■.;■■: 



V 1 



■> -o- 






'%,' ' "° .0^ ^ ' "', , "> 



# 



' 







j .0 












*«& 



%. / 









c ' X 




VEIL'S, 









v°^ ^ 




^ 



'^A '.oho' A° - #0 ^> *"" v>*s***'*^ .Q* *"'■">' > 



ft % ^ x 



.#'% 



C *^7.s 






n W 



s s '^, 







id 




f ^? ,A* 










~o# 





















V-_ * <\N , o n 






o^ x 






1 






^^ 










<^ 















b, " ■-/ , 



■<-■ A" 






* .# 






A* c° N S <^ ' CV <■ v ' 8 * V b A^ % 



* - ^ 







** 






■CV , " * . V ! A* ^° S **,% ' "*, *©, 




'"5 > 



•^ .v 



.o 3 













rt °*. 





- 

> ^ / 

% ,/ 









: ./'% 



^ - : W 





» ' » « . *fe. 



V c 






* ■ W 



r£- / 




+±£ 




*o V 











EMERSON 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 



BY 

JOHN JAY CHAPMAN 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1898 




I 



\1& 



Copyright, 1898, 
By Charles Scribner's Sons. 



WLnttimitu Press: 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. 



CONTENTS 

Page 

Emerson 3 

Walt Whitman . . . in 

A Study of Romeo 131 

Michael Angelo's Sonnets 153 

The Fourth Canto of the Inferno . . 173 

Robert Browning 185 

Robert Louis Stevenson 217 



EMERSON 



EMERSON 



I 



" Leave this hypocritical prating about the 
masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, 
pernicious in their demands and influence, and 
need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. 
I wish not to concede anything to them, but 
to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and 
draw individuals out of them. The worst of 
charity is that the lives you are asked to pre- 
serve are not worth preserving. Masses ! 
The calamity is the masses. I do not wish 
any mass at all, but honest men only, lovely, 
sweet, accomplished women only, and no 
shovel-handed, narrow-brained, gin-drinking 
million stockingers or lazzaroni at all. If 
government knew how, I should like to see 
it check, not multiply the population. 
When it reaches its true law of action, every 
man that is born will be hailed as essential. 
Away with this hurrah of masses, and let us 
have the considerate vote of single men spoken 
on their honor and their conscience." 
3 



EMERSON 

This extract from The Conduct of Life 
gives fairly enough the leading thought of 
Emerson's life. The unending warfare be- 
tween the individual and society shows us in 
each generation a poet or two, a dramatist or 
a musician who exalts and deifies the individual, 
and leads us back again to the only object 
which is really worthy of enthusiasm or which 
can permanently excite it, — the character of a 
man. It is surprising to find this identity of 
content in all great deliverances. The only 
thing we really admire is personal liberty. 
Those who fought for it and those who en- 
joyed it are our heroes. 

But the hero may enslave his race by bring- 
ing in a system of tyranny ; the battle-cry of 
freedom may become a dogma which crushes 
the soul ; one good custom may corrupt the 
world. And so the inspiration of one age 
becomes the damnation of the next. This 
crystallizing of life into death has occurred so 
often that it may almost be regarded as one 
of the laws of progress. 

Emerson represents a protest against the 
tyranny of democracy. He is the most 
recent example of elemental hero-worship. 
His opinions are absolutely unqualified ex- 
cept by his temperament. He expresses 
a form of belief in the importance of the 
4 



EMERSON 

individual which is independent of any per- 
sonal relations he has with the world. It 
is as if a man had been withdrawn from the 
earth and dedicated to condensing and em- 
bodying this eternal idea — the value of the 
individual soul — so vividly, so vitally, that 
his words could not die, yet in such illusive 
and abstract forms that by no chance and by 
no power could his creed be used for pur- 
poses of tyranny. Dogma cannot be ex- 
tracted from it. Schools cannot be built on 
it. It either lives as the spirit lives, or else it 
evaporates and leaves nothing. Emerson was 
so afraid of the letter that killeth that he would 
hardly trust his words to print. He was as- 
sured there was no such thing as literal truth, 
but only literal falsehood. He therefore re- 
sorted to metaphors which could by no chance 
be taken literally. And he has probably 
succeeded in leaving a body of work which 
cannot be made to operate to any other end 
than that for which he designed it. If this be 
true, he has accomplished the inconceivable 
feat of eluding misconception. If it be true, 
he stands alone in the history of teachers ; he 
has circumvented fate, he has left an unmixed 
blessing behind him. 

The signs of those times which brought 
forth Emerson are not wholly undecipherable. 
5 



EMERSON 

They are the same times which gave rise to 
every character of significance during the 
period before the war. Emerson is indeed 
the easiest to understand of all the men of his 
time, because his life is freest from the tangles 
and qualifications of circumstance. He is a 
sheer and pure type and creature of destiny, 
and the unconsciousness that marks his devel- 
opment allies him to the deepest phenomena. 
It is convenient, in describing him, to use 
language which implies consciousness on his 
part, but he himself had no purpose, no theory 
of himself; he was a product. 

The years between 1820 and 1830 were the 
most pitiable through which this country has 
ever passed. The conscience of the North 
was pledged to the Missouri Compromise, and 
that Compromise neither slumbered nor slept. 
In New England, where the old theocratical 
oligarchy of the colonies had survived the 
Revolution and kept under its own water- 
locks the new flood of trade, the conserva- 
tism of politics reinforced the conservatism 
of religion ; and as if these two inquisitions 
were not enough to stifle the soul of man, 
the conservatism of business self-interest 
was superimposed. The history of the con- 
flicts which followed has been written by the 
radicals, who negligently charge up to self- 
6 



EMERSON 

interest all the resistance which establishments 
offer to change. But it was not solely self- 
interest, it was conscience that backed the 
Missouri Compromise, nowhere else, naturally, 
so strongly as in New England. It was con- 
science that made cowards of us all. The 
white-lipped generation of Edward Everett 
were victims, one might even say martyrs, to 
conscience. They suffered the most terrible 
martyrdom that can fall to man, a martyrdom 
which injured their immortal volition and 
dried up the springs of life. If it were not 
that our poets have too seldom deigned to dip 
into real life, I do not know what more awful 
subject for a poem could have been found than 
that of the New England judge enforcing the 
fugitive slave law. For lack of such a poem 
the heroism of these men has been forgotten, 
the losing heroism of conservatism. It was 
this spiritual power of a committed conscience 
which met the new forces as they arose, and it 
deserves a better name than these new forces 
afterward gave it. In 1830 the social fruits 
of these heavy conditions could be seen in the 
life of the people. Free speech was lost. 

" I know no country/' says Tocqueville, 

who was here in 1831, " in which there is 

so little independence of mind and freedom 

of discussion as in America." Tocqueville 

7 



EMERSON 

recurs to the point again and again. He can- 
not disguise his surprise at it, and it tinged 
his whole philosophy and his book. The 
timidity of the Americans of this era was a 
thing which intelligent foreigners could not 
understand. Miss Martineau wrote in her 
Autobiography: "It was not till months 
afterwards that I was told that there were two 
reasons why I was not invited there [Chelsea] 
as elsewhere. One reason was that I had 
avowed, in reply to urgent questions, that I 
was disappointed in an oration of Mr. 
Everett's ; and another was that I had pub- 
licly condemned the institution of slavery. I 
hope the Boston people have outgrown the 
childishness of sulking at opinions not in 
either case volunteered, but obtained by pres- 
sure. But really, the subservience to opinion 
at that time seemed a sort of mania." 

The mania was by no means confined to 
Boston, but qualified this period of our history 
throughout the Northern States. There was 
no literature. " If great writers have not at 
present existed in America, the reason is very 
simply given in the fact that there can be no 
literary genius without freedom of opinion, 
and freedom of opinion does not exist in 
America," wrote Tocqueville. There were 
no amusements, neither music nor sport 
8 



EMERSON 

nor pastime, indoors or out of doors. The 
whole life of the community was a life of the 
intelligence, and upon the intelligence lay the 
weight of intellectual tyranny. The pressure 
kept on increasing, and the suppressed forces 
kept on increasing, till at last, as if to show 
what gigantic power was needed to keep con- 
servatism dominant, the Merchant Province 
put forward Daniel Webster. 

The worst period of panic seems to have 
preceded the anti-slavery agitations of 1831, 
because these agitations soon demonstrated 
that the sky did not fall nor the earth yawn 
and swallow Massachusetts because of Mr. 
Garrison's opinions, as most people had sin- 
cerely believed would be the case. Some 
semblance of free speech was therefore grad- 
ually regained. 

Let us remember the world upon which the 
young Emerson's eyes opened. The South 
was a plantation. The North crooked the 
hinges of the knee where thrift might follow 
fawning. It was the era of Martin Chuzzlewit, 
a malicious caricature, — founded on fact. 
This time of humiliation, when there was no 
free speech, no literature, little manliness, no 
reality, no simplicity, no accomplishment, 
was the era of American brag. We flattered 
the foreigner and we boasted of ourselves. 
9 



EMERSON 

We were over-sensitive, insolent, and cring- 
ing. As late as 1845, G. P. Putnam, a most 
sensible and modest man, published a book 
to show what the country had done in the 
field of culture. The book is a monument 
of the age. With all its good sense and good 
humor, it justifies foreign contempt because 
it is explanatory. Underneath everything 
lay a feeling of unrest, an instinct, — " this 
country cannot permanently endure half slave 
and half free," — which was the truth, but 
which could not be uttered. 

So long as there is any subject which men 
may not freely discuss, they are timid upon 
all subjects. They wear an iron crown and 
talk in whispers. Such social conditions 
crush and maim the individual, and through- 
out New England, as throughout the whole 
North, the individual was crushed and 
maimed. 

The generous youths who came to man- 
hood between 1820 and 1830, while this 
deadly era was maturing, seem to have under- 
gone a revulsion against the world almost 
before touching it ; at least two of them 
suffered, revolted, and condemned, while still 
boys sitting on benches in school, and came 
forth advancing upon this old society like 
gladiators. The activity of William Lloyd 
10 



EMERSON 

Garrison, the man of action, preceded by 
several years that of Emerson, who is his 
prophet. Both of them were parts of one 
revolution. One of Emerson's articles of 
faith was that a man's thoughts spring from 
his actions rather than his actions from his 
thoughts, and possibly the same thing holds 
good for society at large. Perhaps all truths, 
whether moral or economic, must be worked 
out in real life before they are discovered by 
the student, and it was therefore necessary 
that Garrison should be evolved earlier than 
Emerson. 

The silent years of early manhood, during 
which Emerson passed through the Divinity 
School and to his ministry, known by few, 
understood by none, least of all by himself, 
were years in which the revolting spirit of an 
archangel thought out his creed. He came 
forth perfect, with that serenity of which we 
have scarce another example in history, — 
that union of the man himself, his beliefs, and 
his vehicle of expression that makes men 
great because it makes them comprehensible. 
The philosophy into which he had already 
transmuted all his earlier theology at the 
time we first meet him consisted of a very 
simple drawirfg together of a few ideas, all of 
which had long been familiar to the world. 
ii 



EMERSON 

It is the wonderful use he made of these ideas, 
the closeness with which they fitted his soul, 
the tact with which he took what he needed, 
like a bird building its nest, that make the 
originality, the man. 

The conclusion of Berkeley, that the ex- 
ternal world is known to us only through our 
impressions, and that therefore, for aught we 
know, the whole universe exists only in our 
own consciousness, cannot be disproved. It 
is so simple a conception that a child may 
understand it; and it has probably been 
passed before the attention of every thinking 
man since Plato's time. The notion is in it- 
self a mere philosophical catch or crux to 
which there is no answer. It may be true. 
The mystics made this doctrine useful. They 
were not content to doubt the independent 
existence of the external world. They ima- 
gined that this external world, the earth, the 
planets, the phenomena of nature, bore some 
relation to the emotions and destiny of the 
soul. The soul and the cosmos were some- 
how related, and related so intimately that the 
cosmos might be regarded as a sort of pro- 
jection or diagram of the soul. 

Plato was the first man who perceived that 
this idea could be made to provide the philos- 
opher with a vehicle of expression more 

12 



EMERSON 

powerful than any other. If a man will once 
plant himself firmly on the proposition that 
he is the universe, that every emotion or 
expression of his mind is correlated in some 
way to phenomena in the external world, and 
that he shall say how correlated, he is in a 
position where the power of speech is at a 
maximum. His figures of speech, his tropes, 
his witticisms, take rank with the law of grav- 
ity and the precession of the equinoxes. 
Philosophical exaltation of the individual can- 
not go beyond this point. It is the climax. 

This is the school of thought to which 
Emerson belonged. The sun and moon, the 
planets, are mere symbols. They signify 
whatever the poet chooses. The planets for 
the most part stay in conjunction just long 
enough to flash his thought through their 
symbolism, and no permanent relation is 
established between the soul and the zodiac. 
There is, however, one link of correlation be- 
tween the external and internal worlds which 
Emerson considered established, and in which 
he believed almost literally, namely, the moral 
law. This idea he drew from Kant through 
Coleridge and Wordsworth, and it is so famil- 
iar to us all that it hardly needs stating. The 
fancy that the good, the true, the beautiful, — 
all things of which we instinctively approve, 
13 



EMERSON 

— are somehow connected together and are 
really one thing; that our appreciation of 
them is in its essence the recognition of a 
law ; that this law, in fact all law and the very 
idea of law, is a mere subjective experience ; 
and that hence any external sequence which 
we coordinate and name, like the law of grav- 
ity, is really intimately connected with our 
moral nature, — this fancy has probably some 
basis of truth. Emerson adopted it as a 
corner-stone of his thought. 

Such are the ideas at the basis of Emerson's 
philosophy, and it is fair to speak of them in 
this place because they antedate everything 
else which we know of him. They had been 
for years in his mind before he spoke at all. 
It was in the armor of this invulnerable ideal- 
ism and with weapons like shafts of light that 
he came forth to fight. 

In 1836, at the age of thirty-three, Emerson 
published the little pamphlet called Nature, 
which was an attempt to state his creed. Al- 
though still young, he was not without ex- 
perience of life. He had been assistant 
minister to the Rev. Dr. Ware from 1829 
to 1832, when he resigned his ministry on 
account of his views regarding the Lord's 
Supper. He had married and lost his first 
wife in the same interval. He had been 
14 




EMERSON 

abroad and had visited Carlyle in 1833. He 
had returned and settled in Concord, and had 
taken up the profession of lecturing, upon 
which he in part supported himself ever after. 
It is unnecessary to review these early lec- 
tures. " Large portions of them," says Mr. 
Cabot, his biographer, "appeared afterwards in 
the Essays, especially those of the first series." 
Suffice it that through them Emerson had 
become so well known that although Nature 
was published anonymously, he was recog- 
nized as the author. Many people had heard 
of him at the time he resigned his charge, 
and the story went abroad that the young 
minister of the Second Church had gone 
mad. The lectures had not discredited the 
story, and Nature seemed to corroborate it. 
Such was the impression which the book 
made upon Boston in 1836. As we read it 
to-day, we are struck by its extraordinary 
beauty of language. It is a supersensuous, 
lyrical, and sincere rhapsody, written evi- 
dently by a man of genius. It reveals a 
nature compelling respect, — a Shelley, and 
yet a sort of Yankee Shelley, who is mad only 
when the wind is nor'-nor'west ; a mature 
nature which must have been nourished for 
years upon its own thoughts, to speak this 
new language so eloquently, to stand so 
15 



EMERSON 

calmly on its feet. The deliverance of his 
thought is so perfect that this work adapts 
itself to our mood and has the quality of 
poetry. This fluency Emerson soon lost; it 
is the quality missing in his poetry. It is the 
efflorescence of youth. 

" In good health, the air is a cordial of 
incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, 
in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded 
sky, without having in my thoughts any occur- 
rence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed 
a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink 
of fear. In the woods, too, a man casts off 
his years, as the snake his slough, and at what 
period soever of life is always a child. In 
the woods is perpetual youth. Within these 
plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity 
reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the 
guest sees not how he should tire of them in 
a thousand years. ... It is the uniform 
effect of culture on the human mind, not to 
shake our faith in the stability of particular 
phenomena, as heat, water, azote; but to 
lead us to regard nature as phenomenon, 
not a substance ; to attribute necessary exist- 
ence to spirit ; to esteem nature as an accident 
and an effect." 

Perhaps these quotations from the pam- 
phlet called Nature are enough to show the 
16 



EMERSON 

clouds of speculation in which Emerson had 
been walking. With what lightning they 
were charged was soon seen. 

In 1837 ne was asked to deliver the Phi 
Beta Kappa oration at Cambridge. This was 
the opportunity for which he had been wait- 
ing. The mystic and eccentric young poet- 
preacher now speaks his mind, and he turns 
out to be a man exclusively interested in real 
life. This recluse, too tender for contact with 
the rough facts of the world, whose con- 
science has retired him to rural Concord, 
pours out a vial of wrath. This cub puts 
forth the paw of a full-grown lion. 

Emerson has left behind him nothing 
stronger than this address, The American 
Scholar. It was the first application of his 
views to the events of his day, written and 
delivered in the heat of early manhood while 
his extraordinary powers were at their height. 
It moves with a logical progression of which 
he soon lost the habit. The subject of it, 
the scholar's relation to the world, was the 
passion of his life. The body of his belief is 
to be found in this address, and in any ade- 
quate account of him the whole address ought 
to be given. 

" Thus far," he said, " our holiday has been 
simply a friendly sign of the survival of the 



EMERSON 

love of letters amongst a people too busy to 
give to letters any more. As such it is pre- 
cious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. 
Perhaps the time is already come when it 
ought to be, and will be, something else; 
when the sluggard intellect of this continent 
will look from under its iron lids and fill the 
postponed expectation of the world with some- 
thing better than the exertions of mechanical 
skill. . . . The theory of books is noble. 
The scholar of the first age received into him 
the world around ; brooded thereon ; gave it 
the new arrangement of his own mind, and 
uttered it again. It came into him life; it 
went out from him truth. . . . Yet hence 
arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which 
attaches to the act of creation, the act of 
thought, is transferred to the record. The 
poet chanting was felt to be a divine man: 
henceforth the chant is divine, also. The 
writer was a just and wise spirit: hence- 
forward it is settled the book is perfect ; as 
love of the hero corrupts into worship of his 
statue. Instantly the book becomes noxious : 
the guide is a tyrant. . . . Books are the 
best of things, well used ; abused, among 
the worst. What is the right use? What 
is the one end which all means go to effect? 
They are for nothing but to inspire. . . . 
18 



EMERSON 

The one thing in the world, of value, is the act- 
ive soul. This every man is entitled to ; this 
every man contains within him, although in 
almost all men obstructed, and as yet unborn. 
The soul active sees absolute truth and utters 
truth, or creates. In this action it is genius ; 
not the privilege of here and there a favor- 
ite, but the sound estate of every man. . . . 
Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of 
genius by over-influence. The literature of 
every nation bears me witness. The English 
dramatic poets have Shakspearized now for 
two hundred years. . . . These being his 
functions, it becomes him to feel all con- 
fidence in himself, and to defer never to the 
popular cry. He, and he only, knows the 
world. The world of any moment is the 
merest appearance. Some great decorum, 
some fetish of a government, some ephem- 
eral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by 
half mankind and cried down by the other 
half, as if all depended on this particular 
up or down. The odds are that the whole 
question is not worth the poorest thought 
which the scholar has lost in listening to the 
controversy, Let him not quit his belief that 
a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient 
and honorable of the earth affirm it to be 
the crack of doom." 

J 9 



EMERSON 

Dr. Holmes called this speech of Emerson's 
our " intellectual Declaration of Independ- 
ence," and indeed it was. " The Phi Beta 
Kappa speech," says Mr. Lowell, "was an 
event without any former parallel in our liter- 
ary annals, — a scene always to be treasured 
in the memory for its picturesqueness and 
its inspiration. What crowded and breathless 
aisles, what windows clustering with eager 
heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what 
grim silence of foregone dissent ! " 

The authorities of the Divinity School can 
hardly have been very careful readers of 
Nature and The American Scholar, or they 
would not have invited Emerson, in 1838, to 
deliver the address to the graduating class. 
This was Emerson's second opportunity to 
apply his beliefs directly to society. A few 
lines out of the famous address are enough 
to show that he saw in the church of his day 
signs of the same decadence that he saw in 
the letters : " The prayers and even the dog- 
mas of our church are like the zodiac of 
Denderah and the astronomical monuments 
of the Hindoos, wholly insulated from any- 
thing now extant in the life and business of 
the people. They mark the height to which 
the waters once rose. ... It is the office of 
a true teacher to show us that God is, not 
20 



EMERSON 

was ; that he speaketh, not spake. The true 
Christianity — a faith like Christ's in the in- 
finitude of man — is lost. None believeth in 
the soul of man, but only in some man or 
person old and departed. Ah me ! no man 
goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this 
saint or that poet, avoiding the God who 
seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret; 
they love to be blind in public. They think 
society wiser than their soul, and know not 
that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than 
the whole world." 

It is almost misleading to speak of the lofty 
utterances of these early addresses as attacks 
upon society, but their reception explains 
them. The element of absolute courage is 
the same in all natures. Emerson himself 
was not unconscious of what function he was 
performing. 

The " storm in our wash-bowl " which fol- 
lowed this Divinity School address, the letters 
of remonstrance from friends, the advertise- 
ments by the Divinity School of " no com- 
plicity," must have been cheering to Emerson. 
His unseen yet dominating ambition is shown 
throughout the address, and in this note in 
his diary of the following year : — 

"August 31. Yesterday at the Phi Beta 
Kappa anniversary. Steady, steady. I am 
21 



EMERSON 

convinced that if a man will be a true scholar 
he shall have perfect freedom. The young 
people and the mature hint at odium and the 
aversion of forces to be presently encountered 
in society. I say No ; I fear it not." 

The lectures and addresses which form the 
latter half of the first volume in the collected 
edition show the early Emerson in the ripe- 
ness of his powers. These writings have a 
lyrical sweep and a beauty which the later 
works often lack. Passages in them remind 
us of Hamlet: — 

" How silent, how spacious, what room for 
all, yet without space to insert an atom ; — 
in graceful succession, in equal fulness, in 
balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes 
forward still. Like an odor of incense, like a 
strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact and 
boundless. It will not be dissected, nor un- 
ravelled, nor shown. . . . The great Pan of 
old, who was clothed in a leopard skin to 
signify the beautiful variety of things and the 
firmament, his coat of stars, — was but the 
representative of thee, O rich and various 
man ! thou palace of sight and sound, carry- 
ing in thy senses the morning and the night 
and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain, 
the geometry of the City of God; in thy 
heart, the bower of love and the realms of 

22 



EMERSON 

right and wrong. . . . Every star in heaven 
is discontent and insatiable. Gravitation and 
chemistry cannot content them. Ever they 
woo and court the eye of the beholder. 
Every man who comes into the world they 
seek to fascinate and possess, to pass into his 
mind, for they desire to republish themselves 
in a more delicate world than that they oc- 
cupy. . . . So it is with all immaterial objects. 
These beautiful basilisks set their brute glori- 
ous eyes on the eye of every child, and, if 
they can, cause their nature to pass through 
his wondering eyes into him, and so all things 
are mixed." 

Emerson is never far from his main 
thought: — 

" The universe does not attract us till it is 
housed in an individual." " A man, a personal 
ascendency, is the only great phenomenon." 

" I cannot find language of sufficient energy 
to convey my sense of the sacredness of 
private integrity." 

On the other hand, he is never far from his 
great fear : " But Truth is such a fly-away, 
such a sly-boots, so untransportable and un- 
barrelable a commodity, that it is as bad to 
catch as light." " Let him beware of propos- 
ing to himself any end. ... I say to you 
plainly, there is no end so sacred or so large 
23 



EMERSON 

that if pursued for itself will not become car- 
rion and an offence to the nostril." 

There can be nothing finer than Emerson's 
knowledge of the world, his sympathy with 
young men and with the practical difficulties 
of applying his teachings. We can see in his 
early lectures before students and mechanics 
how much he had learned about the structure 
of society from his own short contact with the 
organized church. 

" Each finds a tender and very intelligent 
conscience a disqualification for success. 
Each requires of the practitioner a certain 
shutting of the eyes, a certain dapperness 
and compliance, an acceptance of customs, a 
sequestration from the sentiments of generos- 
ity and love, a compromise of private opinion 
and lofty integrity. . . . The fact that a new 
thought and hope have dawned in your breast, 
should apprise you that in the same hour a 
new light broke in upon a thousand private 
hearts. . . . And further I will not dissemble 
my hope that each person whom I address has 
felt his own call to cast aside all evil customs, 
timidity, and limitations, and to be in his place 
a free and helpful man, a reformer, a bene- 
factor, not content to slip along through the 
world like a footman or a spy, escaping by his 
nimbleness and apologies as many knocks as 
24 



EMERSON 

he can, but a brave and upright man who 
must find or cut a straight road to every- 
thing excellent in the earth, and not only 
go honorably himself, but make it easier for 
all who follow him to go in honor and with 
benefit. . . ." 

Beneath all lay a greater matter, — Emer- 
son's grasp of the forms and conditions of 
progress, his reach of intellect, which could 
afford fair play to every one. 

His lecture on The Conservative is not a 
puzzling jeu d' esprit, like Bishop Blougram's 
Apology, but an honest attempt to set up the 
opposing chessmen of conservatism and reform 
so as to represent real life. Hardly can such 
a brilliant statement of the case be found else- 
where in literature. It is not necessary to 
quote here the reformer's side of the question, 
for Emerson's whole life was devoted to it. 
The conservatives' attitude he gives with such 
accuracy and such justice that the very bank- 
ers of State Street seem to be speaking : — 

" The order of things is as good as the 
character of the population permits. Con- 
sider it as the work of a great and beneficent 
and progressive necessity, which, from the 
first pulsation in the first animal life up to the 
present high culture of the best nations, has 
advanced thus far. . . . 
25 



EMERSON 

" The conservative party in the universe 
concedes that the radical would talk suffi- 
ciently to the purpose if we were still in the 
garden of Eden ; he legislates for man as he 
ought to be; his theory is right, but he 
makes no allowance for friction, and this 
omission makes his whole doctrine false. 
The idealist retorts that the conservative falls 
into a far more noxious error in the other 
extreme. The conservative assumes sickness 
as a necessity, and his social frame is a hos- 
pital, his total legislation is for the present 
distress, a universe in slippers and flannels, 
with bib and pap-spoon, swallowing pills and 
herb tea. Sickness gets organized as well as 
health, the vice as well as the virtue." 

It is unnecessary to go, one by one, through 
the familiar essays and lectures which Emer- 
son published between 1838 and 1875. They 
are in everybody's hands and in everybody's 
thoughts. In 1840 he wrote in his diary: 
" In all my lectures I have taught one doc- 
trine, namely, the infinitude of the private 
man, This the people accept readily enough, 
and even with commendation, as long as I 
call the lecture Art or Politics, or Literature 
or the Household ; but the moment I call it 
Religion they are shocked, though it be only 
the application of the same truth which they 
26 



EMERSON 

receive elsewhere to a new class of facts." 
To the platform he returned, and left it only 
once or twice during the remainder of his 
life. 

His writings vary in coherence. In his 
early occasional pieces, like the Phi Beta 
Kappa address, coherence is at a maximum. 
They were written for a purpose, and were 
perhaps struck off all at once. But he earned 
his living by lecturing, and a lecturer is 
always recasting his work and using it in dif- 
ferent forms. A lecturer has no prejudice 
against repetition. It is noticeable that in 
some of Emerson's important lectures the 
logical scheme is more perfect than in his 
essays. The truth seems to be that in the 
process of working up and perfecting his 
writings, in revising and filing his sentences, 
the logical scheme became more and more 
obliterated. Another circumstance helped 
make his style fragmentary. He was by 
nature a man of inspirations and exalted 
moods. He was subject to ecstasies, during 
which his mind worked with phenomenal 
brilliancy. Throughout his works and in his 
diary we find constant reference to these 
moods, and to his own inability to control or 
recover them. "But what we want is con- 
secutiveness. 'T is with us a flash of light, 
27 



EMERSON 

then a long darkness, then a flash again. Ah ! 
could we turn these fugitive sparkles into an 
astronomy of Copernican worlds ! " 

In order to take advantage of these periods 
of divination, he used to write down the 
thoughts that came to him at such times. 
From boyhood onward he kept journals and 
commonplace books, and in the course of his 
reading and meditation he collected innumer- 
able notes and quotations which he indexed 
for ready use. In these mines he " quarried," 
as Mr. Cabot says, for his lectures and essays. 
When he needed a lecture he went to the 
repository, threw together what seemed to 
have a bearing on some subject, and gave it a 
title. If any other man should adopt this 
method of composition, the result would be in- 
comprehensible chaos; because most men 
have many interests, many moods, many and 
conflicting ideas. But with Emerson it was 
otherwise. There was only one thought 
which could set him aflame, and that was the 
thought of the unfathomed might of man. 
This thought was his religion, his politics, his 
ethics, his philosophy. One moment of in- 
spiration was in him own brother to the next 
moment of inspiration, although they might 
be separated by six weeks. When he came 
to put together his star-born ideas, they fitted 
28 



EMERSON 

well, no matter in what order he placed them, 
because they were all part of the same idea. 

His works are all one single attack on the 
vice of the age, moral cowardice. He assails 
it not by railings and scorn, but by positive 
and stimulating suggestion. The imagination 
of the reader is touched by every device which 
can awake the admiration for heroism, the 
consciousness of moral courage. Wit, quo- 
tation, anecdote, eloquence, exhortation, rhet- 
oric, sarcasm, and very rarely denunciation, 
are launched at the reader, till he feels little 
lambent flames beginning to kindle in him. 
He is perhaps unable to see the exact logical 
connection between two paragraphs of an 
essay, yet he feels they are germane. He 
takes up Emerson tired and apathetic, but 
presently he feels himself growing heady and 
truculent, strengthened in his most inward 
vitality, surprised to find himself again master 
in his own house. 

The difference between Emerson and the 
other moralists is that all these stimulating 
pictures and suggestions are not given by him 
in illustration of a general proposition. They 
have never been through the mill of general- 
ization in his own mind. He himself could 
not have told you their logical bearing on 
one another. They have all the vividness of 
29 



EMERSON 

disconnected fragments of life, and yet they 
all throw light on one another, like the facets 
of a jewel. But whatever cause it was that 
led him to adopt his method of writing, it is 
certain that he succeeded in delivering him- 
self of his thought with an initial velocity and 
carrying power such as few men ever attained. 
He has the force at his command of the 
thrower of the discus. 

His style is American, and beats with the 
pulse of the climate. He is the only writer 
we have had who writes as he speaks, who 
makes no literary parade, has no pretensions 
of any sort. He is the only writer we have 
had who has wholly subdued his vehicle to 
his temperament. It is impossible to name 
his style without naming his character : they 
are one thing. 

Both in language and in elocution Emerson 
was a practised and consummate artist, who 
knew how both to command his effects and to 
conceal his means. The casual, practical, 
disarming directness with which he writes 
puts any honest man at his mercy. What 
difference does it make whether a man who 
can talk like this is following an argument or 
not ? You cannot always see Emerson 
clearly; he is hidden by a high wall; but 
you always know exactly on what spot he is 
3° 



EMERSON 

standing. You judge it by the flight of the 
objects he throws over the wall, — a bootjack, 
an apple, a crown, a razor, a volume of verse. 
With one or other of these missiles, all de- 
livered with a very tolerable aim, he is pretty 
sure to hit you. These catchwords stick in 
the mind. People are not in general influ- 
enced by long books or discourses, but by 
odd fragments of observation which they 
overhear, sentences or head-lines which they 
read while turning over a book at random or 
while waiting for dinner to be announced. 
These are the oracles and orphic words that 
get lodged in the mind and bend a man's 
most stubborn will. Emerson called them 
the Police of the Universe. His works are a 
treasury of such things. They sparkle in the 
mine, or you may carry them off in your 
pocket. They get driven into your mind like 
nails, and on them catch and hang your own 
experiences, till what was once his thought 
has become your character. 

" God offers to every mind its choice be- 
tween truth and repose. Take which you 
please ; you can never have both." " Dis- 
content is want of self-reliance ; it is infirmity 
of will." " It is impossible for a man to be 
cheated by any one but himself." 

The orchestration with which Emerson in- 
3 1 



EMERSON 

troduces and sustains these notes from the 
spheres is as remarkable as the winged things 
themselves. Open his works at a hazard. 
You hear a man talking. 

" A garden is like those pernicious machin- 
eries we read of every month in the news- 
papers, which catch a man's coat-skirt or his 
hand, and draw in his arm, his leg, and his 
whole body to irresistible destruction. In an 
evil hour he pulled down his wall and added 
a field to his homestead. No land is bad, but 
land is worse. If a man own land, the land 
owns him. Now let him leave home if he 
dare. Every tree and graft, every hill of 
melons, row of corn, or quickset hedge, all he 
has done and all he means to do, stand in his 
way like duns, when he would go out of his 
gate." 

Your attention is arrested by the reality of 
this gentleman in his garden, by the first-hand 
quality of his mind. It matters not on what 
subject he talks. While you are musing, 
still pleased and patronizing, he has picked 
up the bow of Ulysses, bent it with the 
ease of Ulysses, and sent a shaft clear through 
the twelve axes, nor missed one of them. 
But this, it seems, was mere byplay and 
marksmanship ; for before you have done 
wondering, Ulysses rises to his feet in anger, 
3 2 



EMERSON 

and pours flight after flight, arrow after arrow, 
from the great bow. The shafts sing and 
strike, the suitors fall in heaps. The brow of 
Ulysses shines with unearthly splendor. The 
air is filled with lightning. After a little, 
without shock or transition, without apparent 
change of tone, Mr. Emerson is offering you 
a biscuit before you leave, and bidding you 
mind the last step at the garden end. If the 
man who can do these things be not an artist, 
then must we have a new vocabulary and re- 
name the professions. 

There is, in all this effectiveness of Emer- 
son, no pose, no literary art; nothing that 
corresponds even remotely to the pretended 
modesty and ignorance with which Socrates 
lays pitfalls for our admiration in Plato's 
dialogues. 

It was the platform which determined Em- 
erson's style. He was not a writer, but a 
speaker. On the platform his manner of 
speech was a living part of his words. The 
pauses and hesitation, the abstraction, the 
searching, the balancing, the turning forward 
and back of the leaves of his lecture, and then 
the discovery, the illumination, the gleam of 
lightning which you saw before your eyes de- 
scend into a man of genius, — all this was 
Emerson. He invented this style of speak- 
3 33 



EMERSON 

ing, and made it express the supersensuous, 
the incommunicable. Lowell wrote, while 
still under the spell of the magician : " Em- 
erson's oration was more disjointed than 
usual, even with him. It began nowhere, and 
ended everywhere, and yet, as always with 
that divine man, it left you feeling that some- 
thing beautiful had passed that way, some- 
thing more beautiful than anything else, like 
the rising and setting of stars. Every pos- 
sible criticism might have been made on it 
but one, — that it was not noble. There was 
a tone in it that awakened all elevating asso- 
ciations. He boggled, he lost his place, he 
had to put on his glasses ; but it was as if a 
creature from some fairer world had lost his 
way in our fogs, and it was our fault, not his. 
It was chaotic, but it was all such stuff as 
stars are made of, and you could n't help feel- 
ing that, if you waited awhile, all that was 
nebulous would be whirled into planets, and 
would assume the mathematical gravity of 
system. All through it I felt something in 
me that cried, ' Ha ! ha ! ' to the sound of the 
trumpets." 

It is nothing for any man sitting in his chair 
to be overcome with the sense of the immedi- 
acy of life, to feel the spur of courage, the 
victory of good over evil, the value, now 
34 



EMERSON 

and forever, of all great-hearted endeavor. 
Such moments come to us all. But for a man 
to sit in his chair and write what shall call up 
these forces in the bosoms of others — that is 
desert, that is greatness. To do this was the 
gift of Emerson. The whole earth is enriched 
by every moment of converse with him. The 
shows and shams of life become transparent, 
the lost kingdoms are brought back, the shut- 
ters of the spirit are opened, and provinces 
and realms of our own existence lie gleaming 
before us. 

It has been necessary to reduce the living 
soul of Emerson to mere dead attributes like 
" moral courage " in order that we might talk 
about him at all. - His effectiveness comes 
from his character ; not from his philosophy, 
nor from his rhetoric nor his wit, nor from 
any of the accidents of his education. He 
might never have heard of Berkeley or Plato. 
A slightly different education might have led 
him to throw his teaching into the form of 
historical essays or of stump speeches. He 
might, perhaps, have been bred a stone- 
mason, and have done his work in the world 
by travelling with a panorama. But he would 
always have been Emerson. His weight and 
his power would always have been the 
same. It is solely as character that he 
35 



EMERSON 

is important. He discovered nothing; he 
bears no relation whatever to the history of 
philosophy. We must regard him and deal 
with him simply as a man. 

Strangely enough, the world has always 
insisted upon accepting him as a thinker: 
and hence a great coil of misunderstanding. 
As a thinker, Emerson is difficult to classify. 
Before you begin to assign him a place, you 
must clear the ground by a disquisition as to 
what is meant by " a thinker," and how 
Emerson differs from other thinkers. As a 
man, Emerson is as plain as Ben Franklin. 

People have accused him of inconsistency; 
they say that he teaches one thing one day, 
and another the next day. But from the point 
of view of Emerson there is no such thing as 
inconsistency. Every man is each day a new 
man. Let him be to-day what he is to-day. 
It is immaterial and waste of time to consider 
what he once was or what he may be. 

His picturesque speech delights in fact and 
anecdote, and a public which is used to treat- 
ises and deduction cares always to be told 
the moral. It wants everything reduced to 
a generalization. All generalizations are 
partial truths, but we are used to them, and 
we ourselves mentally make the proper allow- 
ance. Emerson's method is, not to give a 

36 



EMERSON 

generalization and trust to our making the 
allowance, but to give two conflicting state- 
ments and leave the balance of truth to be 
struck in our own minds on the facts. There 
is no inconsistency in this. It is a vivid and 
very legitimate method of procedure. But 
he is much more than a theorist: he is a 
practitioner. He does not merely state a 
theory of agitation : he proceeds to agitate. 
" Do not," he says, " set the least value on 
what I do, or the least discredit on what I do 
not, as if I pretended to settle anything as 
false or true. I unsettle all things. No facts 
are to me sacred, none are profane. I simply 
experiment, an endless seeker with no past at 
my back." He was not engaged in teaching 
many things, but one thing, — Courage. 
Sometimes he inspires it by pointing to great 
characters, — Fox, Milton, Alcibiades ; some- 
times he inspires it by bidding us beware of 
imitating such men, and, in the ardor of his 
rhetoric, even seems to regard them as hin- 
drances and dangers to our development. 
There is no inconsistency here. Emerson 
might logically have gone one step further and 
raised inconsistency into a jewel. For what 
is so useful, so educational, so inspiring, to a 
timid and conservative man, as to do some- 
thing inconsistent and regrettable? It lends 
37 



EMERSON 

character to him at once. He breathes freer 
and is stronger for the experience. 

Emerson is no cosmopolitan. He is a 
patriot. He is not like Goethe, whose sym- 
pathies did not run on national lines. Emer- 
son has America in his mind's eye all the 
time. There is to be a new religion, and it is 
to come from America ; a new and better type 
of man, and he is to be an American. He 
not only cared little or nothing for Europe, 
but he cared not much for the world at large. 
His thought was for the future of this country. 
You cannot get into any chamber in his mind 
which is below this chamber of patriotism. 
He loves the valor of Alexander and the 
grace of the Oxford athlete; but he loves 
them not for themselves. He has a use for 
them. They are grist to his mill and powder 
to his gun. His admiration of them he sub- 
ordinates to his main purpose, — they are his 
blackboard and diagrams. His patriotism is 
the backbone of his significance. He came to 
his countrymen at a time when they lacked, 
not thoughts, but manliness. The needs of 
his own particular public are always before 
him. 

" It is odd that our people should have, not 
water on the brain, but a little gas there. A 
shrewd foreigner said of the Americans that 
38 



EMERSON 

1 whatever they say has a little the air of a 
speech.' " 

" I shall not need to go into an enumera- 
tion of our national defects and vices which 
require this Order of Censors in the State. . . . 
The timidity of our public opinion is our dis- 
ease, or, shall I say, the publicness of opinion, 
the absence of private opinion." 

" Our measure of success is the moderation 
and low level of an individual's judgment. 
Dr. Channing's piety and wisdom had such 
weight in Boston that the popular idea of 
religion was whatever this eminent divine 
held." 

" Let us affront and reprimand the smooth 
mediocrity, the squalid contentment of the 
times." 

The politicians he scores constantly. 

" Who that sees the meanness of our politics 
but congratulates Washington that he is 
long already wrapped in his shroud and forever 
safe." The following is his description of the 
social world of his day : " If any man consider 
the present aspects of what is called by dis- 
tinction society, he will see the need of these 
ethics. The sinew and heart of man seem to 
be drawn out, and we are become timorous, 
desponding whimperers." 

It is the same wherever we open his books. 



EMERSON 

He must spur on, feed up, bring forward the 
dormant character of his countrymen. When 
he goes to England, he sees in English life 
nothing except those elements which are de- 
ficient in American life. If you wish a cata- 
logue of what America has not, read English 
Traits. Emerson's patriotism had the effect 
of expanding his philosophy. To-day we 
know the value of physique, for science has 
taught it, but it was hardly discovered in his 
day, and his philosophy affords no basis for 
it. Emerson in this matter transcends his 
philosophy. When in England, he was 
fairly made drunk with the physical life he 
found there. He is like Caspar Hauser gaz- 
ing for the first time on green fields. English 
Traits is the ruddiest book he ever wrote. It 
is a hymn to force, honesty, and physical 
well-being, and ends with the dominant note 
of his belief: " By this general activity and by 
this sacredness of individuals, they [the Eng- 
lish] have in seven hundred years evolved the 
principles of freedom. It is the land of 
patriots, martyrs, sages, and bards, and if the 
ocean out of which it emerged should wash 
it away, it will be remembered as an island 
famous for immortal laws, for the announce- 
ments of original right which make the stone 
tables of liberty." He had found in England 
40 



EMERSON 

free speech, personal courage, and reverence 
for the individual. 

No convulsion could shake Emerson or 
make his view unsteady even for an instant. 
What no one else saw, he saw, and he saw 
nothing else. Not a boy in the land wel- 
comed the outbreak of the war so fiercely as 
did this shy village philosopher, then at the 
age of fifty-eight. He saw that war was the 
cure for cowardice, moral as well as physical. 
It was not the cause of the slave that moved 
him ; it was not the cause of the Union for 
which he cared a farthing. It was something 
deeper than either of these things for which 
he had been battling all his life. It was the 
cause of character against convention. What- 
ever else the war might bring, it was sure to 
bring in character, to leave behind it a file of 
heroes; if not heroes, then villains, but in 
any case strong men. On the 9th of April, 
1 86 1, three days before Fort Sumter was 
bombarded, he had spoken with equanimity 
of " the downfall of our character-destroying 
civilization. . . . We find that civilization 
crowed too soon, that our triumphs were 
treacheries ; we had opened the wrong door 
and let the enemy into the castle." 

" Ah," he said, when the firing began, 
" sometimes gunpowder smells good." Soon 
41 



EMERSON 

after the attack on Sumter he said in a public 
address, " We have been very homeless for 
some years past, say since 1850; but now we 
have a country again. . . . The war was an 
eye-opener, and showed men of all parties 
and opinions the value of those primary 
forces that lie beneath all political action." 
And it was almost a personal pledge when 
he said at the Harvard Commemoration in 
1865, "We shall not again disparage Amer- 
ica, now that we have seen what men it will 
bear." 

The place which Emerson forever occupies 
as a great critic is defined by the same sharp 
outlines that mark his work, in whatever light 
and from whatever side we approach it. A 
critic in the modern sense he was not, for his 
point of view is fixed, and he reviews the 
world like a search-light placed on the top of 
a tall tower. He lived too early and at too 
great a distance from the forum of European 
thought to absorb the ideas of evolution and 
give place to them in his philosophy. Evolu- 
tion does not graft well upon the Platonic 
Idealism, nor are physiology and the kindred 
sciences sympathetic. Nothing aroused Em- 
erson's indignation more than the attempts of 
the medical faculty and of phrenologists to 
classify, and therefore limit individuals. " The 
42 



EMERSON 

grossest ignorance does not disgust me like 
this ignorant knowingness." 

We miss in Emerson the underlying con- 
ception of growth, of development, so charac- 
teristic of the thought of our own day, and 
which, for instance, is found everywhere 
latent in Browning's poetry. Browning re- 
gards character as the result of experience 
and as an ever changing growth. To Emer- 
son, character is rather an entity complete 
and eternal from the beginning. He is prob- 
ably the last great writer to look at life from 
a stationary standpoint. There is a certain 
lack of the historic sense in all he has written. 
The ethical assumption that all men are 
exactly alike permeates his work. In his 
mind, Socrates, Marco Polo, and General 
Jackson stand surrounded by the same atmos- 
phere, or rather stand as mere naked charac- 
ters surrounded by no atmosphere at all. He 
is probably the last great writer who will fling 
about classic anecdotes as if they were club 
gossip. In the discussion of morals, this 
assumption does little harm. The stories and 
proverbs which illustrate the thought of the 
moralist generally concern only those simple 
relations of life which are common to all 
ages. There is charm in this familiar dealing 
with antiquity. The classics are thus domes- 
43 



EMERSON 

ticated and made real to us. What matter if 
JEsop appear a little too much like an Ameri- 
can citizen, so long as his points tell ? 

It is in Emerson's treatment of the fine arts 
that we begin to notice his want of historic 
sense. Art endeavors to express subtle and 
ever changing feelings by means of conven- 
tions which are as protean as the forms of a 
cloud ; and the man who in speaking on the 
plastic arts makes the assumption that all 
men are alike will reveal before he has uttered 
three sentences that he does not know what 
art is, that he has never experienced any form 
of sensation from it. Emerson lived in a 
time and clime where there was no plastic art, 
and he was obliged to arrive at his ideas 
about art by means of a highly complex pro- 
cess of reasoning. He dwelt constantly in a 
spiritual place which was the very focus of 
high moral fervor. This was his enthusiasm, 
this was his revelation, and from it he reasoned 
out the probable meaning of the fine arts. 
" This," thought Emerson, his eye rolling in 
a fine frenzy of moral feeling, " this must be 
what Apelles experienced, this fervor is the 
passion of Bramante. I understand the Par- 
thenon." And so he projected his feelings 
about morality into the field of the plastic arts. 
He deals very freely and rather indiscrimi- 
44 



EMERSON 

nately with the names of artists, — Phidias, 
Raphael, Salvator Rosa, — and he speaks 
always in such a way that it is impossible to 
connect what he says with any impression we 
have ever received from the works of those 
masters. 

In fact, Emerson has never in his life felt 
the normal appeal of any painting, or any 
sculpture, or any architecture, or any music. 
These things, of which he does not know the 
meaning in real life, he yet uses, and uses 
constantly, as symbols to convey ethical 
truths. The result is that his books are full 
of blind places, like the notes which will not 
strike on a sick piano. 

It is interesting to find that the one art of 
which Emerson did have a direct understand- 
ing, the art of poetry, gave him some insight 
into the relation of the artist to his vehicle. 
In his essay on Shakespeare there is a full 
recognition of the debt of Shakespeare to his 
times. This essay is filled with the historic 
sense. We ought not to accuse Emerson 
because he lacked appreciation of the fine 
arts, but rather admire the truly Goethean 
spirit in which he insisted upon the reality of 
arts of which he had no understanding. This 
is the same spirit which led him to insist 
on the value of the Eastern poets. Perhaps 
45 



EMERSON 

there exist a few scholars who can tell us how 
far Emerson understood or misunderstood 
Saadi and Firdusi and the Koran. But we 
need not be disturbed for his learning. It is 
enough that he makes us recognize that these 
men were men too, and that their writings 
mean something not unknowable to us. The 
East added nothing to Emerson, but gave 
him a few trappings of speech. The whole of 
his mysticism is to be found in Nature, writ- 
ten before he knew the sages of the Orient, 
and it is not improbable that there is some 
real connection between his own mysticism 
and the mysticism of the Eastern poets. 

Emerson's criticism on men and books is 
like the test of a great chemist who seeks one 
or two elements. He burns a bit of the stuff 
in his incandescent light, shows the lines of it 
in his spectrum, and there an end. 

It was a thought of genius that led him 
to write Representative Men. The scheme 
of this book gave play to every illumination 
of his mind, and it pinned him down to the 
objective, to the field of vision under his 
microscope. The table of contents of Repre- 
sentative Men is the dial of his education. It 
is as follows : Uses of Great Men ; Plato, or 
The Philosopher; Plato, New Readings; 
Swedenborg, or The Mystic; Montaigne, 
46 



EMERSON 

or The Sceptic; Shakespeare, or The Poet; 
Napoleon, or The Man of the World ; Goethe, 
or The Writer. The predominance of the 
writers over all other types of men is not cited 
to show Emerson's interest in The Writer, for 
we know his interest centred in the practical 
man, — even his ideal scholar is a practical 
man, — but to show the sources of his illus- 
tration. Emerson's library was the old-fash- 
ioned gentleman's library. His mines of 
thought were the world's classics. This is 
one reason why he so quickly gained an in- 
ternational currency. His very subjects in 
Representative Men are of universal interest, 
and he is limited only by certain inevitable 
local conditions. Representative Men is 
thought by many persons to be his best 
book. It is certainly filled with the strokes 
of a master. There exists no more profound 
criticism than Emerson's analysis of Goethe 
and of Napoleon, by both of whom he was 
at once fascinated and repelled. 



47 



EMERSON 



II 



The attitude of Emerson's mind toward re- 
formers results so logically from his philos- 
ophy that it is easily understood. He saw 
in them people who sought something as a 
panacea or as an end in itself. To speak 
strictly and not irreverently, he had his own 
panacea, — the development of each individ- 
ual; and he was impatient of any other. 
He did not believe in association. The very 
idea of it involved a surrender by the individ- 
ual of some portion of his identity, and of 
course all the reformers worked through their 
associations. With their general aims he 
sympathized. " These reforms," he wrote, 
" are our contemporaries ; they are ourselves, 
our own light and sight and conscience ; they 
only name the relation which subsists between 
us and the vicious institutions which they go 
to rectify." But with the methods of the re- 
formers he had no sympathy : " He who aims 
at progress should aim at an infinite, not at 
a special benefit. The reforms whose fame 
now fills the land with temperance, anti- 
slavery, non-resistance, no-government, equal 
48 



EMERSON 

labor, fair and generous as each appears, are 
poor bitter things when prosecuted for them- 
selves as an end." Again: " The young men 
who have been vexing society for these last 
years with regenerative methods seem to have 
made this mistake : they all exaggerated some 
special means, and all failed to see that the 
reform of reforms must be accomplished 
without means." 

Emerson did not at first discriminate be- 
tween the movement of the Abolitionists and 
the hundred and one other reform movements 
of the period ; and in this lack of discrimi- 
nation lies a point of extraordinary interest. 
The Abolitionists, as it afterwards turned out, 
had in fact got hold of the issue which was to 
control the fortunes of the republic for thirty 
years. The difference between them and the 
other reformers was this : that the Abolition- 
ists were men set in motion by the primary 
and unreasoning passion of pity. Theory 
played small part in the movement. It grew 
by the excitement which exhibitions of cruelty 
will arouse in the minds of sensitive people. 

It is not to be denied that the social con- 
ditions in Boston in 1831 foreboded an 
outbreak in some form. If the abolition 
excitement had not drafted off the rising 
forces, there might have been a Merry Mount, 
4 49 



■■/ 



EMERSON 

an epidemic of crime or insanity, or a mob of 
some sort. The abolition movement afforded 
the purest form of an indulgence in human 
feeling that was ever offered to men. It was 
intoxicating. It made the agitators perfectly 
happy. They sang at their work and bubbled 
over with exhilaration. They were the only 
people in the United States, at this time, who 
were enjoying an exalted, glorifying, practical 
activity. 

But Emerson at first lacked the touchstone, 
whether of intellect or of heart, to see the 
difference between this particular movement 
and the other movements then in progress. 
Indeed, in so far as he sees any difference 
between the Abolitionists and the rest, it is 
that the Abolitionists were more objectionable 
and distasteful to him. " Those,'' he said, 
" who are urging with most ardor what are 
called the greatest benefits to mankind are 
narrow, conceited, self-pleasing men, and 
affect us as the insane do." And again : " By 
the side of these men [the idealists] the hot 
agitators have a certain cheap and ridiculous 
air ; they even look smaller than others. Of 
the two, I own I like the speculators the best. 
They have some piety which looks with faith 
to a fair future unprofaned by rash and un- 
equal attempts to realize it." He was drawn 
5o 



EMERSON 

into the abolition cause by having the truth 
brought home to him that these people were 
fighting for the Moral Law. He was slow in 
seeing this, because in their methods they 
represented everything he most condemned. 
As soon, however, as he was convinced, he 
was ready to lecture for them and to give 
them the weight of his approval. In 1844 
he was already practically an Abolitionist, 
and his feelings upon the matter deepened 
steadily in intensity ever after. 

The most interesting page of Emerson's 
published journal is the following, written at 
some time previous to 1844; the exact date 
is not given. A like page, whether written 
or unwritten, may be read into the private 
annals of every man who lived before the 
war. Emerson has, with unconscious mas- 
tery, photographed the half-spectre that 
stalked in the minds of all. He wrote : " I 
had occasion to say the other day to Eliza- 
beth Hoar that I like best the strong and 
worthy persons, like her father, who support 
the social order without hesitation or misgiv- 
ing. I like these; they never incommode 
us by exciting grief, pity, or perturbation of 
any sort. But the professed philanthropists, 
it is strange and horrible to say, are an alto- 
gether odious set of people, whom one would 
5 1 



EMERSON 

shun as the worst of bores and canters. But 
my conscience, my unhappy conscience re- 
spects that hapless class who see the faults 
and stains of our social order, and who pray 
and strive incessantly to right the wrong ; this 
annoying class of men and women, though 
they commonly find the work altogether be- 
yond their faculty, and their results are, for 
the present, distressing. They are partial, 
and apt to magnify their own. Yes, and the 
prostrate penitent, also, — he is not compre- 
hensive, he is not philosophical in those tears 
and groans. Yet I feel that under him and 
his partiality and exclusiveness is the earth 
and the sea and all that in them is, and the 
axis around which the universe revolves 
passes through his body where he stands." 

It was the defection of Daniel Webster that 
completed the conversion of Emerson and 
turned him from an adherent into a propa- 
gandist of abolition. Not pity for the slave, 
but indignation at the violation of the Moral 
Law by Daniel Webster, was at the bottom 
of Emerson's anger. His abolitionism was 
secondary to his main mission, his main en- 
thusiasm. It is for this reason that he stands 
on a plane of intellect where he might, under 
other circumstances, have met and defeated 
Webster. After the 7th of March, 1850, he 
5 2 



EMERSON 

recognized in Webster the embodiment of all 
that he hated. In his attacks on Webster, 
Emerson trembles to his inmost fibre with 
antagonism. He is savage, destructive, 
personal, bent on death. 

This exhibition of Emerson as a fighting 
animal is magnificent, and explains his life. 
There is no other instance of his ferocity. 
No other nature but Webster's ever so moved 
him; but it was time to be moved, and 
Webster was a man of his size. Had these 
two great men of New England been matched 
in training as they were matched in en- 
dowment, and had they then faced each 
other in debate, they would not have been 
found to differ so greatly in power. Their 
natures were electrically repellent, but from 
which did the greater force radiate? Their 
education differed so radically that it is im- 
possible to compare them, but if you trans- 
late the Phi Beta Kappa address into politics, 
you have something stronger than Webster, 
— something that recalls Chatham ; and 
Emerson would have had this advantage, — 
that he was not afraid. As it was, he left his 
library and took the stump. Mr. Cabot has 
given us extracts from his speeches : — 

" The tameness is indeed complete ; all are 
involved in one hot haste of terror, — presi- 
53 



EMERSON 

dents of colleges and professors, saints and 
brokers, lawyers and manufacturers ; not a 
liberal recollection, not so much as a snatch 
of an old song for freedom, dares intrude on 
their passive obedience. . . . Mr. Webster, 
perhaps, is only following the laws of his 
blood and constitution. I suppose his 
pledges were not quite natural to him. He 
is a man who lives by his memory; a man 
of the past, not a man of faith and of hope. 
All the drops of his blood have eyes that 
look downward, and his finely developed 
understanding only works truly and with all 
its force when it stands for animal good ; that 
is, for property. He looks at the Union as 
an estate, a large farm, and is excellent in the 
completeness of his defence of it so far. 
What he finds already written he will defend. 
Lucky that so much had got well written 
when he came, for he has no faith in the 
power of self-government. Not the smallest 
municipal provision, if it were new, would 
receive his sanction. In Massachusetts, in 
1776, he would, beyond all question, have 
been a refugee. He praises Adams and Jef- 
ferson, but it is a past Adams and Jefferson. 
A present Adams or Jefferson he would de- 
nounce. . . . But one thing appears certain 
to me : that the Union is at an end as soon as 
54 



EMERSON 

an immoral law is enacted. He who writes a 
crime into the statute book digs under the 
foundations of the Capitol. . . . The words 
of John Randolph, wiser than he knew, have 
been ringing ominously in all echoes for 
thirty years : ' We do not govern the people 
of the North by our black slaves, but by their 
own white slaves.' . . . They come down 
now like the cry of fate, in the moment when 
they are fulfilled." 

The exasperation of Emerson did not sub- 
side, but went on increasing during the next 
four years, and on March 7, 1854, he read his 
lecture on the Fugitive Slave Law at the New 
York Tabernacle : " I have lived all my life 
without suffering any inconvenience from 
American Slavery. I never saw it ; I never 
heard the whip ; I never felt the check on my 
free speech and action, until the other day, 
when Mr. Webster, by his personal influence, 
brought the Fugitive Slave Law on the coun- 
try. I say Mr. Webster, for though the bill 
was not his, it is yet notorious that he was the 
life and soul of it, that he gave it all he had. 
It cost him his life, and under the shadow of 
his great name inferior men sheltered them- 
selves, threw their ballots for it, and made 
the law. . . . Nobody doubts that Daniel 
Webster could make a good speech. No- 
55 



EMERSON 

body doubts that there were good and plau- 
sible things to be said on the part of the 
South. But this is not a question of ingenu- 
ity, not a question of syllogisms, but of sides. 
How came he there? . . . But the question 
which history will ask is broader. In the 
final hour when he was forced by the per- 
emptory necessity of the closing armies to 
take a side, — did he take the part of great 
principles, the side of humanity and justice, 
or the side of abuse, and oppression and 
chaos? . . . He did as immoral men usually 
do, — made very low bows to the Christian 
Church and went through all the Sunday 
decorums, but when allusion was made to the 
question of duty and the sanctions of moral- 
ity, he very frankly said, at Albany, ' Some 
higher law, something existing somewhere be- 
tween here and the heaven — I do not know- 
where.' And if the reporters say true, this 
wretched atheism found some laughter in the 
company." 

It was too late for Emerson to shine as a 
political debater. On May 14, 1857, Longfel- 
low wrote in his diary, " It is rather painful to 
see Emerson in the arena of politics, hissed and 
hooted at by young law students." Emerson 
records a similar experience at a later date : 
" If I were dumb, yet would I have gone and 
56 



EMERSON 

mowed and muttered or made signs. The 
mob roared whenever I attempted to speak, 
and after several beginnings I withdrew." 
There is nothing " painful " here : it is the 
sublime exhibition of a great soul in bondage 
to circumstance. 

The thing to be noted is that this is the 
same man, in the same state of excitement 
about the same idea, who years before spoke 
out in The American Scholar, in the Essays, 
and in the Lectures. 

What was it that had aroused in Emerson 
such Promethean antagonism in 1837 but 
those same forces which in 1850 came to 
their culmination and assumed visible shape 
in the person of Daniel Webster? The formal 
victory of Webster drew Emerson into the 
arena, and made a dramatic episode in his 
life. But his battle with those forces had 
begun thirteen years earlier, when he threw 
down the gauntlet to them in his Phi Beta 
Kappa oration. Emerson by his writings did 
more than any other man to rescue the youth 
of the next generation and fit them for the 
fierce times to follow. It will not be denied 
that he sent ten thousand sons to the war. 

In speaking of Emerson's attitude toward 
the anti-slavery cause, it has been possible to 
dispense with any survey of that movement, 
57 



EMERSON 

because the movement was simple and speci- 
fic and is well remembered. But when we 
come to analyze the relations he bore to some 
of the local agitations of his day, it becomes 
necessary to weave in with the matter a dis- 
cussion of certain tendencies deeply imbedded 
in the life of his times, and of which he him- 
self was in a sense an outcome. In speaking 
of the Transcendentalists, who were essentially 
the children of the Puritans, we must begin with 
some study of the chief traits of Puritanism. 

What parts the factors of climate, circum- 
stance, and religion have respectively played 
in the development of the New England char- 
acter no analysis can determine. We may 
trace the imaginary influence of a harsh creed 
in the lines of the face. We may sometimes 
follow from generation to generation the 
course of a truth which at first sustained the 
spirit of man, till we see it petrify into a 
dogma which now kills the spirits of men. 
Conscience may destroy the character. The 
tragedy of the New England judge enforcing 
the Fugitive Slave Law was no new spectacle 
in New England. A dogmatic crucifixion of 
the natural instincts had been in progress 
there for two hundred years. Emerson, who 
is more free from dogma than any other 
teacher that can be named, yet comes very 

58 



EMERSON 

near being dogmatic in his reiteration of the 
Moral Law. 

Whatever volume of Emerson we take up, 
the Moral Law holds the same place in his 
thoughts. It is the one statable revelation of 
truth which he is ready to stake his all upon. 
" The illusion that strikes me as the master- 
piece in that ring of illusions which our life is, 
is the timidity with which we assert our moral 
sentiment. We are made of it, the world is 
built by it, things endure as they share it ; all 
beauty, all health, all intelligence exist by it; 
yet we shrink to speak of it or range ourselves 
by its side. Nay, we presume strength of him 
or them who deny it. Cities go against it, the 
college goes against it, the courts snatch any 
precedent at any vicious form of law to rule 
it out; legislatures listen with appetite to 
declamations against it and vote it down." 

With this very beautiful and striking pas- 
sage no one will quarrel, nor will any one 
misunderstand it. 

The following passage has the same sort 
of poetical truth. " Things are saturated 
with the moral law. There is no escape from 
it. Violets and grass preach it; rain and 
snow, wind and tides, every change, every 
cause in Nature is nothing but a disguised 
missionary." . . . 

59 



EMERSON 

But Emerson is not satisfied with metaphor. 
" We affirm that in all men is this majestic 
perception and command ; that it is the pres- 
ence of the eternal in each perishing man ; that 
it distances and degrades all statements of 
whatever saints, heroes, poets, as obscure and 
confused stammerings before its silent revela- 
tion. They report the truth. It is the truth." 
In this last extract we have Emerson actually 
affirming that his dogma of the Moral Law 
is Absolute Truth. He thinks it not merely 
a form of truth, like the old theologies, but 
very distinguishable from all other forms in 
the past. 

Curiously enough, his statement of the law 
grows dogmatic and incisive in proportion as 
he approaches the borderland between his 
law and the natural instincts : " The last rev- 
elation of intellect and of sentiment is that in a 
manner it severs the man from all other men ; 
makes known to him that the spiritual powers 
are sufficient to hhn if no other being existed ; 
that he is to deal absolutely in the world, as 
if he alone were a system and a state, and 
though all should perish could make all 
anew." Here we have the dogma applied, 
and we see in it only a new form of old Cal- 
vinism as cruel as Calvinism, and not much 
different from its original. The italics are not 
60 



EMERSON 

Emerson's, but are inserted to bring out an 
idea which is everywhere prevalent in his 
teaching. 

In this final form, the Moral Law, by insist- 
ing that sheer conscience can slake the thirst 
that rises in the soul, is convicted of false- 
hood; and this heartless falsehood is the 
same falsehood that has been put into the 
porridge of every Puritan child for six genera- 
tions. A grown man can digest doctrine and 
sleep at night. But a young person of high 
purpose and strong will, who takes such a lie 
as this half-truth and feeds on it as on the 
bread of life, will suffer. It will injure the 
action of his heart. Truly the fathers have 
eaten sour grapes, therefore the children's 
teeth are set on edge. 

To understand the civilization of cities, we 
must look at the rural population from which 
they draw their life. We have recently had 
our attention called to the last remnants of 
that village life so reverently gathered up by 
Miss Wilkins, and of which Miss Emily Dick- 
inson was the last authentic voice. The spirit 
of this age has examined with an almost patho- 
logical interest this rescued society. We must 
go to it if we would understand Emerson, who 
is the blossoming of its culture. We must 
61 



EMERSON 

study it if we would arrive at any intelligent 
and general view of that miscellaneous crop 
of individuals who have been called the Tran- 
scendentalists. 

Between 1830 and 1840 there were already 
signs in New England that the nutritive and 
reproductive forces of society were not quite 
wholesome, not exactly well adjusted. Self- 
repression was the religion which had been 
inherited. " Distrust Nature " was the motto 
written upon the front of the temple. What 
would have happened to that society if left to 
itself for another hundred years no man can 
guess. It was rescued by the two great re- 
generators of mankind, new land and war. 
The dispersion came, as Emerson said of the 
barbarian conquests of Rome, not a day too 
soon. It happened that the country at large 
stood in need of New England as much as 
New England stood in need of the country. 
This congested virtue, in order to be saved, 
must be scattered. This ferment, in order to 
be kept wholesome, must be used as leaven 
to leaven the whole lump. "As you know," 
says Emerson in his Eulogy on Boston, 
"New England supplies annually a large de- 
tachment of preachers and schoolmasters and 
private tutors to the interior of the South and 
West. . . . We are willing to see our sons 
62 



EMERSON 

emigrate, as to see our hives swarm. That 
is what they were made to do, and what the 
land wants and invites." 

For purposes of yeast, there was never such 
leaven as the Puritan stock. How little the 
natural force of the race had really abated 
became apparent when it was placed under 
healthy conditions, given land to till, foes to 
fight, the chance to renew its youth like the 
eagle. But during this period the relief had 
not yet come. The terrible pressure of Puri- 
tanism and conservatism in New England 
was causing a revolt not only of the Aboli- 
tionists, but of another class of people of a 
type not so virile as they. The times have 
been smartly described by Lowell in his essay 
on Thoreau : — 

" Every possible form of intellectual and 
physical dyspepsia brought forth its gospel. 
Bran had its prophets. . . . Everybody had 
a Mission (with a capital M) to attend to 
everybody else's business. No brain but had 
its private maggot, which must have found 
pitiably short commons sometimes. Not a 
few impecunious zealots abjured the use of 
money (unless earned by other people), pro- 
fessing to live on the internal revenues of the 
spirit. Some had an assurance of instant 
millennium so soon as hooks and eyes should 

63 



EMERSON 

be substituted for buttons. Communities 
were established where everything was to be 
common but common sense. . . . Conven- 
tions were held for every hitherto inconceiv- 
able purpose." 

Whatever may be said of the Transcenden- 
talists, it must not be forgotten that they 
represented an elevation of feeling, which 
through them qualified the next generation, 
and can be traced in the life of New England 
to-day. The strong intrinsic character lodged 
in these recusants was later made manifest ; 
for many of them became the best citizens of 
the commonwealth, — statesmen, merchants, 
soldiers, men and women of affairs. They 
retained their idealism while becoming prac- 
tical men. There is hardly an example of 
what we should have thought would be com- 
mon in their later lives, namely, a reaction 
from so much ideal effort, and a plunge into 
cynicism and malice, scoundrelism and the 
flesh-pots. In their early life they resembled 
the Abolitionists in their devotion to an idea ; 
but with the Transcendentalists self-culture 
and the aesthetic and sentimental education 
took the place of more public aims. They 
seem also to have been persons of greater 
social refinement than the Abolitionists. 

The Transcendentalists were sure of only 
64 



EMERSON 

one thing, — that society as constituted was 
all wrong. In this their main belief they 
were right. They were men and women 
whose fundamental need was activity, contact 
with real life, and the opportunity for social 
expansion ; and they keenly felt the chill and 
fictitious character of the reigning conven- 
tionalities. The rigidity of behavior which 
at this time characterized the Bostonians 
seemed sometimes ludicrous and sometimes 
disagreeable to the foreign visitor. There 
was great gravity, together with a certain 
pomp and dumbness, and these things were 
supposed to be natural to the inhabitants and 
to give them joy. People are apt to forget 
that such masks are never worn with ease. 
They result from the application of an inflex- 
ible will, and always inflict discomfort. The 
Transcendentalists found themselves all but 
stifled in a society as artificial in its decorum 
as the court of France during the last years 
of Louis XIV. 

Emerson was in no way responsible for the 
movement, although he got the credit of hav- 
ing evoked it by his teaching. He was elder 
brother to it, and was generated by its pa- 
rental forces ; but even if Emerson had never 
lived, the Transcendentalists would have ap- 
peared. He was their victim rather than their 
5 65 



EMERSON 

cause. He was always tolerant of them and 
sometimes amused at them, and disposed to 
treat them lightly. It is impossible to analyze 
their case with more astuteness than he did 
in an editorial letter in The Dial. The letter 
is cold, but is a masterpiece of good sense. 
He had, he says, received fifteen letters on the 
Prospects of Culture. " Excellent reasons 
have been shown us why the writers, obviously 
persons of sincerity and elegance, should be 
dissatisfied with the life they lead, and with 
their company. . . . They want a friend to 
whom they can speak and from whom they 
may hear now and then a reasonable word." 
After discussing one or two of their proposals, 
— one of which was that the tiresome " uncles 
and aunts " of the enthusiasts should be placed 
by themselves in one delightful village, the 
dough, as Emerson says, be placed in one 
pan and the leaven in another, — he con- 
tinues : " But it would be unjust not to remind 
our younger friends that whilst this aspiration 
has always made its mark in the lives of men 
of thought, in vigorous individuals it does not 
remain a detached object, but is satisfied along 
with the satisfaction of other aims." Young 
Americans " are educated above the work of 
their times and country, and disdain it. Many 
of the more acute minds pass into a lofty 
66 



EMERSON 

criticism . . . which only embitters their sen- 
sibility to the evil, and widens the feeling of 
hostility between them and the citizens at 
large. . . . We should not know where to find 
in literature any record of so much unbalanced 
intellectuality, such undeniable apprehension 
without talent, so much power without equal 
applicability, as our young men pretend to. 
. . . The balance of mind and body will re- 
dress itself fast enough. Superficialness is the 
real distemper. ... It is certain that specu- 
lation is no succedaneum for life." He then 
turns to find the cure for these distempers in the 
farm lands of Illinois, at that time already be- 
ing fenced in " almost like New England itself," 
and closes with a suggestion that so long as 
there is a woodpile in the yard, and the 
" wrongs of the Indian, of the Negro, of the 
emigrant, remain unmitigated," relief might 
be found even nearer home. 

In his lecture on the Transcendentalists he 
says : " . . . But their solitary and fastidious 
manners not only withdraw them from the 
conversation, but from the labors of the 
world : they are not good citizens, not good 
members of society; unwillingly they bear 
their part of the public and private burdens ; 
they do not willingly share in the public 
charities, in the public religious rites, in the 

6 7 



EMERSON 

enterprises of education, of missions foreign 
and domestic, in the abolition of the slave- 
trade, or in the temperance society. They 
do not even like to vote." A less sympathetic 
observer, Harriet Martineau, wrote of them : 
" While Margaret Fuller and her adult pupils 
sat ' gorgeously dressed,' talking about Mars 
and Venus, Plato and Goethe, and fancying 
themselves the elect of the earth in intellect 
and refinement, the liberties of the republic 
were running out as fast as they could go at a 
breach which another sort of elect persons 
were devoting themselves to repair ; and my 
complaint against the ' gorgeous ' pedants 
was that they regarded their preservers as 
hewers of wood and drawers of water, and 
their work as a less vital one than the pedan- 
tic orations which were spoiling a set of well- 
meaning women in a pitiable way." Harriet 
Martineau, whose whole work was practical, 
and who wrote her journal in 1855 and 
in the light of history, was hardly able to 
do justice to these unpractical but sincere 
spirits. 

Emerson was divided from the Transcen- 
dentalists by his common sense. His shrewd 
business intellect made short work of their 
schemes. Each one of their social projects 
contained some covert economic weakness, 
68 



EMERSON 

which always turned out to lie in an attack 
upon the integrity of the individual, and which 
Emerson of all men could be counted on to 
detect. He was divided from them also by 
the fact that he was a man of genius, who had 
sought out and fought out his means of ex- 
pression. He was a great artist, and as such 
he was a complete being. No one could give 
to him nor take from him. His yearnings 
found fruition in expression. He was sure of 
his place and of his use in this world. But 
the Transcendentalists were neither geniuses 
nor artists nor complete beings. Nor had 
they found their places or uses as yet. They 
were men and women seeking light. They 
walked in dry places, seeking rest and finding 
none. The Transcendentalists are not col- 
lectively important because their Sturm und 
Drang was intellectual and bloodless. Though 
Emerson admonish and Harriet Martineau 
condemn, yet from the memorials that sur- 
vive, one is more impressed with the suffer- 
ings than with the ludicrousness of these 
persons. There is something distressing 
about their letters, their talk, their memoirs, 
their interminable diaries. They worry and 
contort and introspect. They rave and 
dream. They peep and theorize. They cut 
open the bellows of life to see where the wind 



EMERSON 

comes from. Margaret Fuller analyzes Em- 
erson, and Emerson Margaret Fuller. It is 
not a wholesome ebullition of vitality. It is a 
nightmare, in which the emotions, the terror, 
the agony, the rapture, are all unreal, and 
have no vital content, no consequence in the 
world outside. It is positively wonderful 
that so much excitement and so much suffer- 
ing should have left behind nothing in the 
field of art which is valuable. All that intel- 
ligence could do toward solving problems for 
his friends Emerson did. But there are situ- 
ations in life in which the intelligence is help- 
less, and in which something else, something 
perhaps possessed by a ploughboy, is more 
divine than Plato. 

If it were not pathetic, there would be 
something cruel — indeed there is something 
cruel — in Emerson's incapacity to deal with 
Margaret Fuller. He wrote to her on October 
24, 1840: " My dear Margaret, I have your 
frank and noble and affecting letter, and yet I 
think I could wish it unwritten. I ought 
never to have suffered you to lead me into 
any conversation or writing on our relation, a 
topic from which with all persons my Genius 
warns me away." 

The letter proceeds with unimpeachable 
emptiness and integrity in the same strain. 
70 



EMERSON 

In 1841 he writes in his diary: " Strange, 
cold-warm, attractive-repelling conversation 
with Margaret, whom I always admire, most 
revere when I nearest see, and sometimes 
love; yet whom I freeze and who freezes 
me to silence when we promise to come 
nearest." 

Human sentiment was known to Emerson 
mainly in the form of pain. His nature 
shunned it ; he cast it off as quickly as pos- 
sible. There is a word or two in the essay on 
Love which seems to show that the inner and 
diaphanous core of this seraph had once, but 
not for long, been shot with blood : he recalls 
only the pain of it. His relations with Mar- 
garet Fuller seem never normal, though they 
lasted for years. This brilliant woman was in 
distress. She was asking for bread, and he 
was giving her a stone, and neither of them 
was conscious of what was passing. This is 
pitiful. It makes us clutch about us to catch 
hold, if we somehow may, of the hand of a 
man. 

There was manliness in Horace Greeley, 
under whom Miss Fuller worked on the New 
York Tribune not many years afterward. She 
wrote : " Mr. Greeley I like, — nay, more, 
love. He is in his habit a plebeian, in his 
heart a nobleman. His abilities in his own 
7i 



EMERSON 

way are great. He believes in mine to a sur- 
prising degree. We are true friends." 

This anaemic incompleteness of Emerson's 
character can be traced to the philosophy of 
his race ; at least it can be followed in that 
philosophy. There is an implication of 
a fundamental falsehood in every bit of 
Transcendentalism, including Emerson. That 
falsehood consists in the theory of the self- 
sufficiency of each individual, men and women 
alike. Margaret Fuller is a good example of 
the effect of this philosophy, because her 
history afterward showed that she was con- 
stituted like other human beings, was depend- 
ent upon human relationship, and was not 
only a very noble, but also a very womanly 
creature. Her marriage, her Italian life, and 
her tragic death light up with the splendor of 
reality the earlier and unhappy period of her 
life. This woman had been driven into her 
vagaries by the lack of something which she 
did not know existed, and which she sought 
blindly in metaphysics. Harriet Martineau 
writes of her : " It is the most grievous loss I 
have almost ever known in private history, the 
deferring of Margaret Fuller's married life so 
long. That noble last period of her life is 
happily on record as well as the earlier." 
The hardy Englishwoman has here laid a kind 
72 



EMERSON 

human hand on the weakness of New England, 
and seems to be unconscious that she is 
making a revelation as to the whole Tran- 
scendental movement. But the point is this : 
there was no one within reach of Margaret 
Fuller, in her early days, who knew what was 
her need. One offered her Kant, one Comte, 
one Fourier, one Swedenborg, one the Moral 
Law. You cannot feed the heart on these 
things. 

Yet there is a bright side to this New Eng- 
land spirit, which seems, if we look only to 
the graver emotions, so dry, dismal, and de- 
ficient. A bright and cheery courage appears 
in certain natures of which the sun has made 
conquest, that almost reconciles us to all loss, 
so splendid is the outcome. The practical, 
dominant, insuppressible active temperaments 
who have a word for every emergency, and 
who carry the controlled force of ten men at 
their disposal, are the fruits of this same spirit. 
Emerson knew not tears, but he and the 
hundred other beaming and competent char- 
acters which New England has produced 
make us almost envy their state. They give 
us again the old Stoics at their best. 

Very closely connected with this subject — 
the crisp and cheery New England tempera- 
ment — lies another which any discussion of 
73 



EMERSON 

Emerson must bringup, — namely, Asceticism. 
It is probable that in dealing with Emerson's 
feelings about the plastic arts we have to do 
with what is really the inside, or metaphysical 
side, of the same phenomena which present 
themselves on the outside, or physical side, in 
the shape of asceticism. 

Emerson's natural asceticism is revealed to 
us in almost every form in which history can 
record a man. It is in his philosophy, in his 
style, in his conduct, and in his appearance. 
It was, however, not in his voice. Mr. Cabot, 
with that reverence for which every one must 
feel personally grateful to him, has preserved 
a description of Emerson by the New York 
journalist, N. P. Willis : " It is a voice with 
shoulders in it, which he has not; with lungs 
in it far larger than his; with a walk which 
the public never see ; with a fist in it which 
his own hand never gave him the model for ; 
and with a gentleman in it which his parochial 
and ' bare-necessaries-of-life ' sort of exterior 
gives no other betrayal of. We can imagine 
nothing in nature (which seems too to have a 
type for everything) like the want of corre- 
spondence between the Emerson that goes in 
at the eye and the Emerson that goes in at 
the ear. A heavy and vase-like blossom of a 
magnolia, with fragrance enough to perfume 
74 



EMERSON 

a whole wilderness, which should be lifted by 
a whirlwind and dropped into a branch of 
aspen, would not seem more as if it could 
never have grown there than Emerson's voice 
seems inspired and foreign to his visible and 
natural body." Emerson's ever exquisite 
and wonderful good taste seems closely con- 
nected with this asceticism, and it is probable 
that his taste influenced his views and conduct 
to some small extent. 

The anti-slavery people were not always 
refined. They were constantly doing things 
which were tactically very effective, but were 
not calculated to attract the over-sensitive. 
Garrison's rampant and impersonal egotism 
was good politics, but bad taste. Wendell 
Phillips did not hesitate upon occasion to 
deal in personalities of an exasperating kind. 
One sees a certain shrinking in Emerson from 
tiie taste of the Abolitionists. It was not 
merely their doctrines or their methods which 
offended him. He at one time refused to 
give Wendell Phillips his hand because of 
Phillips's treatment of his friend, Judge Hoar. 
One hardly knows whether to be pleased at 
Emerson for showing a human weakness, or 
annoyed at him for not being more of a man. 
The anecdote is valuable in both lights. It is 
like a tiny speck on the crystal of his character 
75 



EMERSON 

which shows us the exact location of the orb, 
and it is the best illustration of the feeling of 
the times which has come down to us. 

If by " asceticism " we mean an experiment 
in starving the senses, there is little harm in 
it. Nature will soon reassert her dominion, 
and very likely our perceptions will be sharp- 
ened by the trial. But " natural asceticism " 
is a thing hardly to be distinguished from 
functional weakness. What is natural asceti- 
cism but a lack of vigor? Does it not tend 
to close the avenues between the soul and the 
universe? " Is it not so much death? " The 
accounts of Emerson show him to have been 
a man in whom there was almost a hiatus 
between the senses and the most inward spirit 
of life. The lower register of sensations and 
emotions which domesticate a man into fel- 
lowship with common life was weak. Genial 
familiarity was to him impossible ; laughter 
was almost a pain. " It is not the sea and 
poverty and pursuit that separate us. Here 
is Alcott by my door, — yet is the union more 
profound ? No ! the sea, vocation, poverty, 
are seeming fences, but man is insular and 
cannot be touched. Every man is an infi- 
nitely repellent orb, and holds his individual 
being on that condition. . . . Most of the 
persons whom I see in my own house I see 
76 



EMERSON 

across a gulf; I cannot go to them nor they 
come to me." 

This aloofness of Emerson must be remem- 
bered only as blended with his benignity. 
" His friends were all that knew him," and, as 
Dr. Holmes said, " his smile was the well- 
remembered line of Terence written out in 
living features." Emerson's journals show 
the difficulty of his intercourse even with him- 
self. He could not reach himself at will, nor 
could another reach him. The sensuous and 
ready contact with nature which more carnal 
people enjoy was unknown to him. He had 
eyes for the New England landscape, but for 
no other scenery. If there is one supreme 
sensation reserved for man, it is the vision of 
Venice seen from the water. This sight 
greeted Emerson at the age of thirty. The 
famous city, as he approached it by boat, 
" looked for some time like nothing but New 
York. It is a great oddity, a city for beavers, 
but to my thought a most disagreeable resi- 
dence. You feel always in prison and soli- 
tary. It is as if you were always at sea. I 
soon had enough of it." 

Emerson's contempt for travel and for the 

"rococo toy," Italy, is too well known to 

need citation. It proceeds from the same 

deficiency of sensation. His eyes saw noth- 

77 



EMERSON 

ing; his ears heard nothing. He believed 
that men travelled for distraction and to kill 
time. The most vulgar plutocrat could not 
be blinder to beauty nor bring home less from 
Athens than this cultivated saint. Everything 
in the world which must be felt with a glow 
in the breast, in order to be understood, was 
to him dead-letter. Art was a name to him ; 
music was a name to him ; love was a name 
to him. His essay on Love is a nice compila- 
tion of compliments and elegant phrases end- 
ing up with some icy morality. It seems 
very well fitted for a gift-book or an old-fash- 
ioned lady's annual. 

" The lovers delight in endearments, in 
avowals of love, in comparisons of their re- 
gards. . . . The soul which is in the soul of 
each, craving a perfect beatitude, detects 
incongruities, defects, and disproportion in 
the behavior of the other. Hence arise 
surprise, expostulation, and pain. Yet that 
which drew them to each other was signs of 
loveliness, signs of virtue; and these virtues 
are there, however eclipsed. They appear 
and reappear and continue to attract; but 
the regard changes, quits the sign and at- 
taches to the substance. This repairs the 
wounded affection. Meantime, as life wears 
on, it proves a game of permutation and com- 

7 8 



EMERSON 

bination of all possible positions of the par- 
ties, to employ all the resources of each, and 
acquaint each with the weakness of the 
other. ... At last they discover that all 
which at first drew them together — those 
once sacred features, that magical play of 
charms — was deciduous, had a prospective 
end like the scaffolding by which the house 
was built, and the purification of the intellect 
and the heart from year to year is the real 
marriage, foreseen and prepared from the 
first, and wholly above their conscious- 
ness. . . . Thus are we put in training for a 
love which knows not sex nor person nor 
partiality, but which seeks wisdom and virtue 
everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue 
and wisdom. . . . There are moments when 
the affections rule and absorb the man, and 
make his happiness dependent on a person or 
persons. But in health the mind is presently 
seen again," etc. 

All this is not love, but the merest literary 
coquetry. Love is different from this. Lady 
Burton, when a very young girl, and six 
years before her engagement, met Burton at 
Boulogne. They met in the street, but did 
not speak. A few days later they were for- 
mally introduced at a dance. Of this she 
writes: "That was a night of nights. He 
79 



EMERSON 

waltzed with me once, and spoke to me 
several times. I kept the sash where he put 
his arm around me and my gloves, and never 
wore them again." 

A glance at what Emerson says about 
marriage shows that he suspected that institu- 
tion. He can hardly speak of it without 
some sort of caveat or precaution. " Though 
the stuff of tragedy and of romances is in a 
moral union of two superior persons whose 
confidence in each other for long years, out 
of sight and in sight, and against all appear- 
ances, is at last justified by victorious proof 
of probity to gods and men, causing joyful 
emotions, tears, and glory, — though there be 
for heroes this moral uniori, yet they too are 
as far as ever from an intellectual union, and 
the moral is for low and external purposes, 
like the corporation of a ship's company or 
of a fire club." In speaking of modern 
novels, he says : " There is no new element, 
no power, no furtherance. 'T is only confec- 
tionery, not the raising of new corn. Great 
is the poverty of their inventions. She was 
beautiful, and he fell in love. . . . Happy 
will that house be in which the relations are 
formed by character; after the highest and 
not after the lowest; the house in which 
character marries and not confusion and a 
80 



EMERSON 

miscellany of unavowable motives. ... To 
each occurs soon after puberty, some event, 
or society or way of living, which becomes 
the crisis of life and the chief fact in their 
history. In women it is love and marriage 
(which is more reasonable), and yet it is 
pitiful to date and measure all the facts and 
sequel of an unfolding life from such a youth- 
ful and generally inconsiderate period as the 
age of courtship and marriage. . . . Women 
more than all are the element and kingdom 
of illusion. Being fascinated they fascinate. 
They see through Claude Lorraines. And 
how dare any one, if he could, pluck away 
the coulisses, stage effects and ceremonies by 
which they live ? Too pathetic, too pitiable, 
is the region of affection, and its atmosphere 
always liable to mirage." 

We are all so concerned that a man who 
writes about love shall tell the truth that if he 
chance to start from premises which are false 
or mistaken, his conclusions will appear not 
merely false, but offensive. It makes no 
matter how exalted the personal character of 
the writer may be. Neither sanctity nor 
intellect nor moral enthusiasm, though they 
be intensified to the point of incandescence, 
can make up for a want of nature. 

This perpetual splitting up of love into two 
6 81 



EMERSON 

species, one of which is condemned, but 
admitted to be useful — is it not degrading? 
There is in Emerson's theory of the relation 
between the sexes neither good sense, nor 
manly feeling, nor sound psychology. It is 
founded on none of these things. It is a pure 
piece of dogmatism, and reminds us that he 
was bred to the priesthood. We are not to 
imagine that there was in this doctrine any- 
thing peculiar to Emerson. But we are sur- 
prised to find the pessimism inherent in the 
doctrine overcome Emerson, to whom pessi- 
mism is foreign. Both doctrine and pessimism 
are a part of the Puritanism of the times. 
They show a society in which the intellect 
had long been used to analyze the affections, 
in which the head had become dislocated 
from the body. To this disintegration of the 
simple passion of love may be traced the lack 
of maternal tenderness characteristic of the 
New England nature. The relation between 
the blood and the brain was not quite normal 
in this civilization, nor in Emerson, who is 
its most remarkable representative. 

If we take two steps backward from the 
canvas of this mortal life and glance at it im- 
partially, we shall see that these matters of 
love and marriage pass like a pivot through 
the lives of almost every individual, and are, 
82 



EMERSON 

sociologically speaking, the primum mobile of 
the world. The books of any philosopher 
who slurs them or distorts them will hold up 
a false mirror to life. If an inhabitant of 
another planet should visit the earth, he would 
receive, on the whole, a truer notion of human 
life by attending an Italian opera than he 
would by reading Emerson's volumes. He 
would learn from the Italian opera that there 
were two sexes ; and this, after all, is proba- 
bly the fact with which the education of such 
a stranger ought to begin. 

In a review of Emerson's personal charac- 
ter and opinions, we are thus led to see that 
his philosophy, which finds no room for the 
emotions, is a faithful exponent of his own 
and of the New England temperament, which 
distrusts and dreads the emotions. Regarded 
as a sole guide to life for a young person of 
strong conscience and undeveloped affections, 
his works might conceivably be even harmful 
because of their unexampled power of purely 
intellectual stimulation. 

Emerson's poetry has given rise to much 
heart-burning and disagreement Some peo- 
ple do not like it. They fail to find the fire 
in the ice. On the other hand, his poems 
appeal not only to a large number of pro- 
83 



EMERSON 

fessed lovers of poetry, but also to a class of 
readers who find in Emerson an element for 
which they search the rest of poesy in vain. 

It is the irony of fate that his admirers 
should be more than usually sensitive about 
his fame. This prophet who desired not to 
have followers, lest he too should become a 
cult and a convention, and whose main thesis 
throughout life was that piety is a crime, has 
been calmly canonized and embalmed in am- 
ber by the very forces he braved. He is 
become a tradition and a sacred relic. You 
must speak of him under your breath, and 
you may not laugh near his shrine. 

Emerson's passion for nature was not like 
the passion of Keats or of Burns, of Coleridge 
or of Robert Browning ; compared with these 
men he is cold. His temperature is below 
blood-heat, and his volume of poems stands 
on the shelf of English poets like the icy fish 
which in Caliban upon Setebos is described as 
finding himself thrust into the warm ooze of 
an ocean not his own. 

But Emerson is a poet, nevertheless, a very 
extraordinary and rare man of genius, whose 
verses carry a world of their own within them. 
They are overshadowed by the greatness of 
his prose, but they are authentic. He is the 
chief poet of that school of which Emily 
84 



EMERSON 

Dickinson is a minor poet. His poetry is a 
successful spiritual deliverance of great inter- 
est. His worship of the New England land- 
scape amounts to a religion. His poems do 
that most wonderful thing, make us feel that 
we are alone in the fields and with the trees, — 
not English fields nor French lanes, but New 
England meadows and uplands. There is no 
human creature in sight, not even Emerson 
is there, but the wind and the flowers, the 
wild birds, the fences, the transparent atmos- 
phere, the breath of nature. There is a deep 
and true relation between the intellectual and 
almost dry brilliancy of Emerson's feelings 
and the landscape itself. Here is no de- 
fective English poet, no Shelley without the 
charm, but an American poet, a New England 
poet with two hundred years of New England 
culture and New England landscape in 
him. 

People are forever speculating upon what 
will last, what posterity will approve, and 
some people believe that Emerson's poetry 
will outlive his prose. The question is idle. 
The poems are alive now, and they may or 
may not survive the race whose spirit they 
embody ; but one thing is plain : they have 
qualities which have preserved poetry in the 
past. They are utterly indigenous and sin- 
85 



EMERSON 

cere. They are short. They represent a 
civilization and a climate. 

His verse divides itself into several classes. 
We have the single lyrics, written somewhat 
in the style of the later seventeenth century. 
Of these The Humble Bee is the most ex- 
quisite, and although its tone and imagery 
can be traced to various well-known and 
dainty bits of poetry, it is by no means an 
imitation, but a masterpiece of fine taste. 
The Rhodora and Terminus and perhaps a 
few others belong to that class of poetry 
which, like Abou Ben Adhem, is poetry be- 
cause it is the perfection of statement. The 
Boston Hymn, the Concord Ode, and the 
other occasional pieces fall in another class, 
and do not seem to be important. The first 
two lines of the Ode, 

" O tenderly the haughty day 
Fills his blue urn with fire." 

are for their extraordinary beauty worthy of 
some mythical Greek, some Simonides, some 
Sappho, but the rest of the lines are com- 
monplace. Throughout his poems there are 
good bits, happy and golden lines, snatches 
of grace. He himself knew the quality of his 
poetry, and wrote of it, 

" All were sifted through and through, 
Five lines lasted sound and true." 
86 



EMERSON 

He is never merely conventional, and his po- 
etry, like his prose, is homespun and sound. 
But his ear was defective : his rhymes are 
crude, and his verse is often lame and un- 
musical, a fault which can be countervailed 
by nothing but force, and force he lacks. To 
say that his ear was defective is hardly strong 
enough. Passages are not uncommon which 
hurt the reader and unfit him to proceed ; as, 
for example : — 

" Thorough a thousand voices 
Spoke the universal dame : 
1 Who telleth one of my meanings 
Is master of all I am.' " 

He himself has very well described the im- 
pression his verse is apt to make on a new 
reader when he says, — 

" Poetry must not freeze, but flow." 

The lovers of Emerson's poems freely ac- 
knowledge all these defects, but find in them 
another element, very subtle and rare, very 
refined and elusive, if not altogether unique. 
This is the mystical element or strain which 
qualifies many of his poems, and to which 
some of them are wholly devoted. 

There has been so much discussion as to 
Emerson's relation to the mystics that it is 
well here to turn aside for a moment and 
87 



EMERSON 

consider the matter by itself. The elusive- 
ness of " mysticism " arises out of the fact 
that it is not a creed, but a state of mind. It is 
formulated into no dogmas, but, in so far as it 
is communicable, it is conveyed, or sought to 
be conveyed, by symbols. These symbols to 
a sceptical or an unsympathetic person will 
say nothing, but the presumption among 
those who are inclined towards the cult is 
that if these symbols convey anything at all, 
that thing is mysticism. The mystics are 
right. The familiar phrases, terms, and sym- 
bols of mysticism are not meaningless, and a 
glance at them shows that they do tend 
to express and evoke a somewhat definite 
psychic condition. 

There is a certain mood of mind experi- 
enced by most of us in which we feel the 
mystery of existence ; in which our conscious- 
ness seems to become suddenly separated 
from our thoughts, and we find ourselves 
asking, " Who am I ? What are these 
thoughts?" The mood is very apt to over- 
take us while engaged in the commonest acts. 
In health it is always momentary, and seems 
to coincide with the instant of the transition 
and shift of our attention from one thing to 
another. It is probably connected with the 
transfer of energy from one set of faculties to 



EMERSON 

another set, which occurs, for instance, on 
our waking from sleep, on our hearing a bell 
at night, on our observing any common ob- 
ject, a chair or a pitcher, at a time when our 
mind is or has just been thoroughly pre- 
occupied with something else. This dis- 
placement of the attention occurs in its most 
notable form when we walk from the study 
into the open fields. Nature then attacks us 
on all sides at once, overwhelms, drowns, and 
destroys our old thoughts, stimulates vaguely 
and all at once a thousand new ideas, dissi- 
pates all focus of thought and dissolves our 
attention. If we happen to be mentally fa- 
tigued, and we take a walk in the country, 
a sense of immense relief, of rest and joy, 
which nothing else on earth can give, accom- 
panies this distraction of the mind from its 
problems. The reaction fills us with a sense 
of mystery and expansion. It brings us to 
the threshold of those spiritual experiences 
which are the obscure core and reality of our 
existence, ever alive within us, but generally 
veiled and sub-conscious. It brings us, as it 
were, into the ante-chamber of art, poetry, 
and music. The condition is one of excita- 
tion and receptiveness, where art may speak 
and we shall understand. On the other hand, 
the condition shows a certain dethronement 
89 



EMERSON 

of the will and attention which may ally it to 
the hypnotic state. 

Certain kinds of poetry imitate this method of 
nature by calling on us with a thousand voices 
at once. Poetry deals often with vague or con- 
tradictory statements, with a jumble of images, 
a throng of impressions. But in true poetry 
the psychology of real life is closely followed. 
The mysticism is momentary. We are not kept 
suspended in a limbo, " trembling like a guilty 
thing surprised," but are ushered into another 
world of thought and feeling. On the other 
hand, a mere statement of inconceivable things 
is the reductio ad absurdum of poetry, because 
such a statement puzzles the mind, scatters 
the attention, and does to a certain extent 
superinduce the " blank misgivings " of mys- 
ticism. It does this, however, zvithout going 
further and filling the mind with new life. If 
I bid a man follow my reasoning closely, and 
then say, " I am the slayer and the slain, I am 
the doubter and the doubt," I puzzle his mind, 
and may succeed in reawakening in him the 
sense he has often had come over him that we 
are ignorant of our own destinies and cannot 
grasp the meaning of life. If I do this, noth- 
ing can be a more legitimate opening for a 
poem, for it is an opening of the reader's 
mind. Emerson, like many other highly or- 
90 



EMERSON 

ganized persons, was acquainted with the 
mystic mood. It was not momentary with 
him. It haunted him, and he seems to have 
believed that the whole of poetry and religion 
was contained in the mood. And no one can 
gainsay that this mental condition is intimately 
connected with our highest feelings and leads 
directly into them. 

The fault with Emerson is that he stops in 
the ante-chamber of poetry. He is content 
if he has brought us to the hypnotic point. 
His prologue and overture are excellent, but 
where is the argument ? Where is the sub- 
stantial artistic content that shall feed our 
souls ? 

The Sphinx is a fair example of an Emerson 
poem. The opening verses are musical, 
though they are handicapped by a reminis- 
cence of the German way of writing. In the 
succeeding verses we are lapped into a charm- 
ing reverie, and then at the end suddenly 
jolted by the question, "What is it all 
about ? " In this poem we see expanded 
into four or five pages of verse an experience 
which in real life endures an eighth of a sec- 
ond, and when we come to the end of the 
mood we are at the end of the poem. 

There is no question that the power to 
throw your sitter into a receptive mood by a 
9i 



EMERSON 

pass or two which shall give you his virgin 
attention is necessary to any artist. Nobody 
has the knack of this more strongly than 
Emerson in his prose writings. By a phrase 
or a common remark he creates an ideal at- 
mosphere in which his thought has the direct- 
ness of great poetry. But he cannot do it 
in verse. He seeks in his verse to do the 
very thing which he avoids doing in his prose : 
follow a logical method. He seems to know 
too much what he is about, and to be content 
with doing too little. His mystical poems, 
from the point of view of such criticism as 
this, are all alike in that they all seek to do 
the same thing. Nor does he always succeed. 
How does he sometimes fail in verse to say 
what he conveys with such everlasting happi- 
ness in prose ! 

" I am owner of the sphere, 
Of the seven stars and the solar year, 
Of Caesar's hand and Plato's brain, 
Of Lord Christ's heart and Shakespeare's strain." 

In these lines we have the same thought 
which appears a few pages later in prose: 
"All that Shakespeare says of the king, 
yonder slip of a boy that reads in the 
corner feels to be true of himself." He has 
failed in the verse because he has thrown a 
mystical gloss over a thought which was 
92 



EMERSON 

stronger in its simplicity; because in the 
verse he states an abstraction instead of giving 
an instance. The same failure follows him 
sometimes in prose when he is too conscious 
of his machinery. 

Emerson knew that the sense of mystery 
accompanies the shift of an absorbed attention 
to some object which brings the mind back to 
the present. " There are times when the 
cawing of a crow, a weed, a snowflake, a 
boy's willow whistle, or a farmer planting in 
his field is more suggestive to the mind than 
the Yosemite gorge or the Vatican would be 
in another hour. In like mood, an old verse, 
or certain words, gleam with rare significance." 
At the close of his essay on History he is 
trying to make us feel that all history, in so 
far as we can know it, is within ourselves, and 
is in a certain sense autobiography. He is 
speaking of the Romans, and he suddenly 
pretends to see a lizard on the wall, and 
proceeds to wonder what the lizard has to do 
with the Romans. For this he has been quite 
properly laughed at by Dr. Holmes, because 
he has resorted to an artifice and has failed to 
create an illusion. Indeed, Dr. Holmes is 
somewhere so irreverent as to remark that a 
gill of alcohol will bring on a psychical state 
very similar to that suggested by Emerson ; 
93 



EMERSON 

and Dr. Holmes is accurately happy in his 
jest, because alcohol does dislocate the atten- 
tion in a thoroughly mystical manner. 

There is throughout Emerson's poetry, as 
throughout all of the New England poetry, 
too much thought, too much argument. 
Some of his verse gives the reader a very 
curious and subtle impression that the lines 
are a translation. This is because he is 
closely following a thesis. Indeed, the lines 
are a translation. They were thought first, 
and poetry afterwards. Read off his poetry, 
and you see through the scheme of it at once. 
Read his prose, and you will be put to it to 
make out the connection of ideas. The 
reason is that in the poetry the sequence is 
intellectual, in the prose the sequence is emo- 
tional. It is no mere epigram to say that his 
poetry is governed by the ordinary laws of 
prose writing, and his prose by the laws of 
poetry. 

The lines entitled Days have a dramatic 
vigor, a mystery, and a music all their own : — 

" Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, 
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, 
And marching single in an endless file, 
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. 
To each they offer gifts after his will, 
Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all. 

94 



EMERSON 

I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp, 
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily 
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day 
Turned and departed silent. I, too late, 
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn." 

The prose version of these lines, which in 
this case is inferior, is to be found in Works and 
Days : " He only is rich who owns the day. . . . 
They come and go like muffled and veiled 
figures, sent from a distant friendly party ; but 
they say nothing, and if we do not use the 
gifts they bring, they carry them as silently 
away." 

That Emerson had within him the soul of 
a poet no one will question, but his poems 
are expressed in prose forms. There are 
passages in his early addresses which can be 
matched in English only by bits from Sir 
Thomas Browne or Milton, or from the great 
poets. Heine might have written the follow- 
ing parable into verse, but it could not have 
been finer. It comes from the very bottom 
of Emerson's nature. It is his uttermost. 
Infancy and manhood and old age, the first 
and the last of him, speak in it. 

" Every god is there sitting in his sphere. 
The young mortal enters the hall of the firma- 
ment ; there is he alone with them alone, they 
pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and 
95 



EMERSON 

beckoning him up to their thrones. On the 
instant, and incessantly, fall snowstorms of 
illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd 
which sways this way and that, and whose 
movements and doings he must obey; he 
fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. 
The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now 
furiously commanding this thing to be done, 
now that. What is he that he should resist 
their will, and think or act for himself? Every 
moment new changes and new showers of 
deceptions to baffle and distract him. And 
when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears 
and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods 
still sitting around him on their thrones, — 
they alone with him alone." 

With the war closes the colonial period of 
our history, and with the end of the war 
begins our national life. Before that time it 
was not possible for any man to speak for the 
nation, however much he might long to, for 
there was no nation ; there were only discord- 
ant provinces held together by the exercise 
on the part of each of a strong and conscien- 
tious will. It is too much to expect that 
national character shall be expressed before 
it is developed, or that the arts shall flourish 
during a period when everybody is preoccu- 

9 6 



EMERSON 

pied with the fear of revolution. The provin- 
cial note which runs through all our literature 
down to the war resulted in one sense from 
our dependence upon Europe. " All Ameri- 
can manners, language, and writings," says 
Emerson, " are derivative. We do not write 
from facts, but we wish to state the facts after 
the English manner. It is the tax we pay for 
the splendid inheritance of English Litera- 
ture." But in a deeper sense this very 
dependence upon Europe was due to our dis- 
union among ourselves. The equivocal and 
unhappy self-assertive patriotism to which we 
were consigned by fate, and which made us 
perceive and resent the condescension of 
foreigners, was the logical outcome of our 
political situation. 

The literature of the Northern States before 
the war, although full of talent, lacks body, 
lacks courage. It has not a full national tone. 
The South is not in it. New England's share 
in this literature is so large that small injustice 
will be done if we give her credit for all of it. 
She was the Academy of the land, and her 
scholars were our authors. The country at 
large has sometimes been annoyed at the self- 
consciousness of New England, at the atmos- 
phere of clique, of mutual admiration, of 
isolation, in which all her scholars, except 
7 97 



EMERSON 

Emerson, have lived, and which notably en- 
veloped the last little distinguished group of 
them. The circumstances which led to the 
isolation of Lowell, Holmes, Longfellow, and 
the Saturday Club fraternity are instructive. 
The ravages of the war carried off the poets, 
scholars, and philosophers of the generation 
which immediately followed these men, and 
by destroying their natural successors left 
them standing magnified beyond their natural 
size, like a grove of trees left by a fire. The 
war did more than kill off a generation of 
scholars who would have succeeded these 
older scholars. It emptied the universities 
by calling all the survivors into the field of 
practical life; and after the war ensued a 
period during which all the learning of the 
land was lodged in the heads of these older 
worthies who had made their mark long be- 
fore. A certain complacency which piqued 
the country at large was seen in these men. 
An ante-bellum colonial posing, inevitable in 
their own day, survived with them. When 
Jared Sparks put Washington in the proper 
attitude for greatness by correcting his spell- 
ing, Sparks was in cue with the times. It was 
thought that a great man must have his hat 
handed to him by his biographer, and be 
ushered on with decency toward posterity. 



EMERSON 

In the lives and letters of some of our re- 
cent public men there has been a reminis- 
cence of this posing, which we condemn as 
absurd because we forget it is merely archaic. 
Provincial manners are always a little formal, 
and the pomposity of the colonial governor 
was never quite worked out of our literary 
men. 

Let us not disparage the past. We are all 
grateful for the New England culture, and 
especially for the little group of men in Cam- 
bridge and Boston who did their best accord- 
ing to the light of their day. Their purpose 
and taste did all that high ideals and good 
taste can do, and no more eminent literati 
have lived during this century. They gave 
the country songs, narrative poems, odes, 
epigrams, essays, novels. They chose their 
models well, and drew their materials from 
decent and likely sources. They lived stain- 
less lives, and died in their professors' chairs 
honored by all men. For achievements of 
this sort we need hardly use as strong lan- 
guage as Emerson does in describing con- 
temporary literature : " It exhibits a vast 
carcass of tradition every year with as much 
solemnity as a new revelation." 

The mass and volume of literature must al- 
ways be traditional, and the secondary writers 
99 



EMERSON 

of the world do nevertheless perform a func- 
tion of infinite consequence in the spread of 
thought. A very large amount of first-hand 
thinking is not comprehensible to the average 
man until it has been distilled and is fifty 
years old. The men who welcome new learn- 
ing as it arrives are the picked men, the 
minor poets of the next age. To their own 
times these secondary men often seem great 
because they are recognized and understood 
at once. We know the disadvantage under 
which these Humanists of ours worked. The 
shadow of the time in which they wrote hangs 
over us still. The conservatism and timidity 
of our politics and of our literature to-day are 
due in part to that fearful pressure which for 
sixty years was never lifted from the souls of 
Americans. That conservatism and timidity 
may be seen in all our past. They are in 
the rhetoric of Webster and in the style of 
Hawthorne. They killed Poe. They created 
Bryant. 

Since the close of our most blessed war, 
we have been left to face the problems 
of democracy, unhampered by the terrible 
complications of sectional strife. It has 
happened, however, that some of the ten- 
dencies of our commercial civilization go 
toward strengthening and riveting upon us 
ioo 



EMERSON 

the very traits encouraged by provincial 
disunion. Wendell Phillips, with a cool 
grasp of understanding for which he is not 
generally given credit, states the case as 
follows : — 

"The general judgment is that the freest 
possible government produces the freest pos- 
sible men and women, the most individual, 
the least servile to the judgment of others. 
But a moment's reflection will show any man 
that this is an unreasonable expectation, and 
that, on the contrary, entire equality and free- 
dom in political forms almost invariably tend 
to make the individual subside into the mass 
and lose his identity in the general whole. 
Suppose we stood in England to-night. There 
is the nobility, and here is the church. There 
is the trading class, and here is the literary. 
A broad gulf separates the four; and pro- 
vided a member of either can conciliate his 
own section, he can afford in a very large 
measure to despise the opinions of the other 
three. He has to some extent a refuge and a 
breakwater against the tyranny of what we 
call public opinion. But in a country like 
ours, of absolute democratic equality, public 
opinion is not only omnipotent, it is omni- 
present. There is no refuge from its tyranny, 
there is no hiding from its reach; and the 

IOI 



EMERSON 

result is that if you take the old Greek lantern 
and go about to seek among a hundred, you 
will find not one single American who has 
not, or who does not fancy at least that he 
has, something to gain or lose in his ambition, 
his social life, or his business, from the good 
opinion and the votes of those around him. 
And the consequence is that instead of being 
a mass of individuals, each one fearlessly blurt- 
ing out his own convictions, as a nation, com- 
pared to other nations, we are a mass of 
cowards. More than all other people, we are 
afraid of each other." 

If we take a bird's-eye view of our history, 
we shall find that this constant element of 
democratic pressure has always been so 
strong a factor in moulding the character of 
our citizens, that there is less difference than 
we could wish to see between the types of 
citizenship produced before the war and after 
the war. 

Charles Follen, that excellent and worthy 
German who came to this country while still 
a young man and who lived in the midst of 
the social and intellectual life of Boston, felt 
the want of intellectual freedom in the people 
about him. If one were obliged to describe 
the America of to-day in a single sentence, 
one could hardly do it better than by a sen- 

I02 



EMERSON 

tence from a letter of Follen to Harriet Mar- 
tineau written in 1837, after the appearance 
of one of her books : " You have pointed 
out the two most striking national charac- 
teristics, ' Deficiency of individual moral in- 
dependence and extraordinary mutual respect 
and kindness.' " 

Much of what Emerson wrote about the 
United States in 1850 is true of the United 
States to-day. It would be hard to find a 
civilized people who are more timid, more 
cowed in spirit, more illiberal, than we. It 
is easy to-day for the educated man who 
has read Bryce and Tocqueville to account 
for the mediocrity of American literature. 
The merit of Emerson was that he felt the 
atmospheric pressure without knowing its 
reason. He felt he was a cabined, cribbed, 
confined creature, although every man about 
him was celebrating Liberty and Democracy, 
and every day was Fourth of July. He taxes 
language to its limits in order to express his 
revolt. He says that no man should write 
except what he has discovered in the process 
of satisfying his own curiosity, and that every 
man will write well in proportion as he has 
contempt for the public. 

Emerson seems really to have believed that 
if any man would only resolutely be himself, 
103 



EMERSON 

he would turn out to be as great as Shake- 
speare. He will not have it that anything of 
value can be monopolized. His review of the 
world, whether under the title of Manners, 
Self- Reliance, Fate, Experience, or what-not, 
leads him to the same thought. His conclu- 
sion is always the finding of eloquence, 
courage, art, intellect, in the breast of the 
humblest reader. He knows that we are full 
of genius and surrounded by genius, and that 
we have only to throw something off, not to 
acquire any new thing, in order to be bards, 
prophets, Napoleons, and Goethes. This 
belief is the secret of his stimulating power. 
It is this which gives his writings a radiance 
like that which shone from his personality. 

The deep truth shadowed forth by Emerson 
when he said that " all the American geniuses 
lacked nerve and dagger " was illustrated by 
our best scholar. Lowell had the soul of the 
Yankee, but in his habits of writing he con- 
tinued English tradition. His literary essays 
are full of charm. The Commemoration Ode 
is the high-water mark of the attempt to do 
the impossible. It is a fine thing, but it is 
imitative and secondary. It has paid the in- 
heritance tax. Twice, however, at a crisis of 
pressure, Lowell assumed his real self under 
the guise of a pseudonym; and with his 
104 






EMERSON 

own hand he rescued a language, a type, a 
whole era of civilization from oblivion. Here 
gleams the dagger and here is Lowell re- 
vealed. His limitations as a poet, his too 
much wit, his too much morality, his mixture 
of shrewdness and religion, are seen to be the 
very elements of power. The novelty of the 
Biglow Papers is as wonderful as their world- 
old naturalness. They take rank with great- 
ness, and they were the strongest political 
tracts of their time. They imitate nothing; 
they are real. 

Emerson himself was the only man of his 
times who consistently and utterly expressed 
himself, never measuring himself for a moment 
with the ideals of others, never troubling him- 
self for a moment with what literature was or 
how literature should be created. The other 
men of his epoch, and among whom he lived, 
believed that literature was a very desirable 
article, a thing you could create if you were 
only smart enough. But Emerson had no 
literary ambition. He cared nothing for 
belles-lettres. The consequence is that he 
stands above his age like a colossus. While 
he lived his figure could be seen from Europe 
towering like Atlas over the culture of the 
United States. 

Great men are not always like wax which 
io 5 



EMERSON 

their age imprints. They are often the mere 
negation and opposite of their age. They 
give it the lie. They become by revolt the 
very essence of all the age is not, and that 
part of the spirit which is suppressed in ten 
thousand breasts gets lodged, isolated, and 
breaks into utterance in one. Through 
Emerson spoke the fractional spirits of a 
multitude. He had not time, he had not 
energy left over to understand himself; he 
was a mouthpiece. 

If a soul be taken and crushed by democ- 
racy till it utter a cry, that cry will be Emer- 
son. The region of thought he lived in, the 
figures of speech he uses, are of an intellectual 
plane so high that the circumstances which 
produced them may be forgotten ; they are 
indifferent. The Constitution, Slavery, the 
War itself, are seen as mere circumstances. 
They did not confuse him while he lived; 
they are not necessary to support his work 
now that it is finished. Hence comes it that 
Emerson is one of the world's voices. He 
was heard afar off. His foreign influence 
might deserve a chapter by itself. Conser- 
vatism is not confined to this country. It is 
the very basis of all government. The bolts 
Emerson forged, his thought, his wit, his per- 
ception, are not provincial. They were found 
106 



EMERSON 

to carry inspiration to England and Germany. 
Many of the important men of the last half- 
century owe him a debt It is not yet possi- 
ble to give any account of his influence 
abroad, because the memoirs which will show 
it are only beginning to be published. We 
shall have them in due time; for Emerson 
was an outcome of the world's progress. 
His appearance marks the turning-point in 
the history of that enthusiasm for pure 
democracy which has tinged the political 
thought of the world for the past one hun- 
dred and fifty years. The youths of England 
and Germany may have been surprised at 
hearing from America a piercing voice of 
protest against the very influences which were 
crushing them at home. They could not 
realize that the chief difference between 
Europe and America is a difference in the 
rate of speed with which revolutions in 
thought are worked out. 

While the radicals of Europe were revolt- 
ing in 1848 against the abuses of a tyranny 
whose roots were in feudalism, Emerson, the 
great radical of America, the arch-radical of 
the world, was revolting against the evils 
whose roots were in universal suffrage. By 
showing the identity in essence of all tyranny, 
and by bringing back the attention of politi- 
107 



EMERSON 

cal thinkers to its starting-point, the value of 
human character, he has advanced the politi- 
cal thought of the world by one step. He 
has pointed out for us in this country to 
what end our efforts must be bent. 



108 






WALT WHITMAN 



WALT WHITMAN 



It would be an ill turn for an essay-writer 
to destroy Walt Whitman, — for he was dis- 
covered by the essayists, and but for them 
his notoriety would have been postponed 
for fifty years. He is the mare's nest of 
"American Literature," and scarce a contrib- 
utor to The Saturday Review but has at 
one time or another raised a flag over him. 

The history of these chronic discoveries of 
Whitman as a poet, as a force, as a some- 
thing or a somebody, would write up into 
the best possible monograph on the incom- 
petency of the Anglo-Saxon in matters of 
criticism. 

English literature is the literature of 
genius, and the Englishman is the great 
creator. His work outshines the genius of 
Greece. His wealth outvalues the combined 
wealth of all modern Europe. The English 
mind is the only unconscious mind the world 
has ever seen. And for this reason the 
English mind is incapable of criticism. 
hi 



WALT WHITMAN 



There has never been an English critic of 
the first rank, hardly a critic of any rank; 
and the critical work of England consists 
either of an academical bandying of a few 
old canons and shibboleths out of Horace or 
Aristotle, or else of the merest impression- 
ism, and wordy struggle to convey the sen- 
timent awakened by the thing studied. 

Now, true criticism means an attempt to 
find out what something is, not for the pur- 
pose of judging it, or of imitating it, nor for 
the purpose of illustrating something else, 
nor for any other ulterior purpose whatever. 

The so-called canons of criticism are of 
about as much service to a student of liter- 
ature as the Nicene Creed and the Lord's 
Prayer are to the student of church history. 
They are a part of his subject, of course, 
but if he insists upon using them as a tape 
measure and a divining-rod he will produce 
a judgment of no possible value to any one, 
and interesting only as a record of a most 
complex state of mind. 

The educated gentlemen of England have 
surveyed literature with these time-honored 
old instruments, and hordes of them long 
ago rushed to America with their theodolites 
and their quadrants in their hands. They 
sized us up and they sized us down, and 

112 



WALT WHITMAN 

they never could find greatness in literature 
among us till Walt Whitman appeared and 
satisfied the astrologers. 

Here was a comet, a man of the people, 
a new man, who spoke no known language, 
who was very uncouth and insulting, who 
proclaimed himself a "barbaric yawp," and 
who corresponded to the English imagination 
with the unpleasant and rampant wildness 
of everything in America, — with Mormon- 
ism and car factories, steamboat explosions, 
strikes, repudiation, and whiskey; whose 
form violated every one of their minor 
canons as America violated every one of 
their social ideas. 

Then, too, Whitman arose out of the war, 
as Shakespeare arose out of the destruction 
of the Armada, as the Greek poets arose out 
of the repulse of the Persians. It was impos- 
sible, it was unprecedented, that a national 
revulsion should not produce national poetry 
— and lo ! here was Whitman. 

It may safely be said that the discovery 
of Whitman as a poet caused many a hard- 
thinking Oxford man to sleep quietly at 
night. America was solved. 

The Englishman travels, but he travels 
after his mind has been burnished by the 
university, and at an age when the best he 
8 113 



WALT WHITMAN 

can do in the line of thought is to make an 
intelligent manipulation of the few notions 
he leaves home with. He departs an edu- 
cated gentleman, taking with him his port- 
manteau and his ideas. He returns a travelled 
gentleman, bringing with him his ideas and 
his portmanteau. He would as soon think 
of getting his coats from Kansas as his 
thoughts from travel. And therefore every 
impression of America which the travelling 
Englishman experienced confirmed his theory 
of Whitman. Even Rudyard Kipling, who 
does not in any sense fall under the above 
description, has enough Anglo-Saxon blood 
in him to see in this country only the ful- 
filment of the fantastic notions of his child- 
hood. 

But imagine an Oxford man who had eyes 
in his head, and who should come to this 
country, never having heard of Whitman. 
He would see an industrious and narrow- 
minded population, commonplace and monot- 
onous, so uniform that one man can hardly 
be distinguished from another, law-abiding, 
timid, and traditional; a community where 
the individual is suppressed by law, custom, 
and instinct, and in which, by consequence, 
there are few or no great men, even count- 
ing those men thrust by necessary operation 
114 



WALT WHITMAN 

of the laws of trade into commercial prom- 
inence, and who claim scientific rather than 
personal notice. 

The culture of this people, its archi- 
tecture, letters, drama, etc., he would find 
were, of necessity, drawn from European 
models; and in its poetry, so far as poetry 
existed, he would recognize a somewhat 
feeble imitation of English poetry. The 
newspaper verses very fairly represent the 
average talent for poetry and average appre- 
ciation of it, and the newspaper verse of the 
United States is precisely what one would 
expect from a decorous and unimaginative 
population, — intelligent, conservative, and 
uninspired. 

Above the newspaper versifiers float the 
minor poets, and above these soar the greater 
poets; and the characteristics of the whole 
hierarchy are the same as those of the hum- 
blest acolyte, — intelligence, conservatism, 
conventional morality. 

Above the atmosphere they live in, above 
the heads of all the American poets, and 
between them and the sky, float the Consti- 
tution of the United States and the tradi- 
tions and forms of English literature. 

This whole culture is secondary and ter- 
tiary, and it truly represents the respect- 
"5 




WALT WHITMAN 

able mediocrity from which it emanates. 
Whittier and Longfellow have been much 
read in their day, — read by mill-hands and 
clerks and school-teachers, by lawyers and 
doctors and divines, by the reading classes of 
the republic, whose ideals they truly spoke 
for, whose yearnings and spiritual life they 
truly expressed. 

Now, the Oxford traveller would not have 
found Whitman at all. He would never have 
met a man who had heard of him, nor seen a 
man like him. 

The traveller, as he opened his Saturday 
Review upon his return to London, and 
read the current essay on Whitman, would 
have been faced by a problem fit to puzzle 
Montesquieu, a problem to floor Goethe. 

And yet Whitman is representative. He 
is a real product, he has a real and most 
interesting place in the history of literature, 
and he speaks for a class and type of human 
nature whose interest is more than local, 
whose prevalence is admitted, — a type which 
is one of the products of the civilization of 
the century, perhaps of all centuries, and 
which has a positively planetary significance. 

There are, in every country, individuals 
who, after a sincere attempt to take a place 
in organized society, revolt from the drudgery 
116 



WALT WHITMAN 

of it, content themselves with the simplest 
satisfactions of the grossest need of nature, 
so far as subsistence is concerned, and re- 
discover the infinite pleasures of life in the 
open air. 

If the roadside, the sky, the distant town, 
the soft buffeting of the winds of heaven, 
are a joy to the aesthetic part of man, 
the freedom from all responsibility and ac- 
countability is Nirvana to his moral nature. 
A man who has once tasted these two joys 
together, the joy of being in the open air and 
the joy of being disreputable and unashamed, 
has touched an experience which the most 
close-knit and determined nature might well 
dread. Life has no terrors for such a man. 
Society has no hold on him. The trifling 
inconveniences of the mode of life are as 
nothing compared with its satisfactions. 
The worm that never dies is dead in him. 
The great mystery of consciousness and of 
effort is quietly dissolved into the vacant 
happiness of sensation, — ■ not base sensation, 
but the sensation of the dawn and the sun- 
set, of the mart and the theatre, and the 
stars, the panorama of the universe. 

To the moral man, to the philosopher or 
the business man, to any one who is a cog 
in the wheel of some republic, all these 
117 



WALT WHITMAN 

things exist for the sake of something else. 
He must explain or make use of them, or 
define his relation to them. He spends the 
whole agony of his existence in an endeavor 
to docket them and deal with them. Ham- 
pered as he is by all that has been said and 
done before, he yet feels himself driven on 
to summarize, and wreak himself upon the 
impossible task of grasping this cosmos 
with his mind, of holding it in his hand, 
of subordinating it to his purpose. 

The tramp is freed from all this. By an 
act as simple as death, he has put off effort 
and lives in peace. 

It is no wonder that every country in 
Europe shows myriads of these men, as it 
shows myriads of suicides annually. It is 
no wonder, though the sociologists have been 
late in noting it, that specimens of the type 
are strikingly identical in feature in every 
country of the globe. 

The habits, the physique, the tone of 
mind, even the sign-language and some of 
the catch-words, of tramps are the same 
everywhere. The men are not natally out- 
casts. They have always tried civilized life. 
Their early training, at least their early atti- 
tude of mind towards life, has generally been 
respectable. That they should be criminally 
118 



WALT WHITMAN 

inclined goes without saying, because their 
minds have been freed from the sanctions 
which enforce law. But their general inno- 
cence is, under the circumstances, very re- 
markable, and distinguishes them from the 
criminal classes. 

When we see one of these men sitting on 
a gate, or sauntering down a city street, how 
often have we wondered how life appeared 
to him; what solace and what problems it 
presented. How often have we longed to 
know the history of such a soul, told, not 
by the police-blotter, but by the poet or 
novelist in the heart of the man! 

Walt Whitman has given utterance to 
the soul of the tramp. A man of genius 
has passed sincerely and normally through 
this entire experience, himself unconscious 
of what he was, and has left a record of 
it to enlighten and bewilder the literary 
world. 

In Whitman's works the elemental parts 
of a man's mind and the fragments of imper- 
fect education may be seen merging together, 
floating and sinking in a sea of insensate 
egotism and rhapsody, repellent, divine, dis- 
gusting, extraordinary. 

Our inability to place the man intellec- 
tually, and find a type and reason for his 
119 



WALT WHITMAN 



intellectual state, comes from this : that the 
revolt he represents is not an intellectual 
revolt. Ideas are not at the bottom of it. 
It is a revolt from drudgery. It is the 
revolt of laziness. 

There is no intellectual coherence in his 
talk, but merely pathological coherence. 
Can the insulting jumble of ignorance and 
effrontery, of scientific phrase and French 
paraphrase, of slang and inspired adjective, 
which he puts forward with the pretence 
that it represents thought, be regarded, from 
any possible point of view, as a philosophy, 
or a system, or a belief? Is it individualism 
of any statable kind ? Do the thoughts and 
phrases which float about in it have a mean- 
ing which bears any relation to the meaning 
they bear in the language of thinkers? Cer- 
tainly not. Does all the patriotic talk, the 
talk about the United States and its future, 
have any significance as patriotism ? Does 
it poetically represent the state of feeling of 
any class of American citizens towards their 
country? Or would you find the nearest 
equivalent to this emotion in the breast of 
the educated tramp of France, or Germany, 
or England? The speech of Whitman is 
English, and his metaphors and catch-words 
are apparently American, but the emotional 
120 



WALT WHITMAN 

content is cosmic. He put off patriotism 
when he took to the road. 

The attraction exercised by his writings 
is due to their flashes of reality. Of course 
the man was a poseur, a most horrid mounte- 
bank and ego-maniac. His tawdry scraps 
of misused idea, of literary smartness, of 
dog-eared and greasy reminiscence, repel us. 
The world of men remained for him as his 
audience, and he did to civilized society the 
continuous compliment of an insane self- 
consciousness in its presence. 

Perhaps this egotism and posturing is the 
revenge of a stilled conscience, and we ought 
to read in it the inversion of the social 
instincts. Perhaps all tramps are poseurs. 
But there is this to be said for Whitman, 
that whether or not his posing was an acci- 
dent of a personal nature, or an organic re- 
sult of his life, he was himself an authentic 
creature. He did not sit in a study and 
throw off his saga of balderdash, but he lived 
a life, and it is by his authenticity, and not 
by his poses, that he has survived. 

The descriptions of nature, the visual 
observation of life, are first-hand and won- 
derful. It was no false light that led the 
Oxonians to call some of his phrases Homeric. 
The pundits were right in their curiosity over 

121 



WALT WHITMAN 







him ; they went astray only in their attempt 
at classification. 

It is a pity that truth and beauty turn to 
cant on the second delivery, for it makes 
poetry, as a profession, impossible. The 
lyric poets have always spent most of their 
time in trying to write lyric poetry, and the 
very attempt disqualifies them. 

A poet who discovers his mission is already 
half done for; and even Wordsworth, great 
genius though he was, succeeded in half 
drowning his talents in his parochial 
theories, in his own self-consciousness and 
self-conceit. 

Walt Whitman thought he had a mission. 
He was a professional poet. He had pur- 
poses and theories about poetry which he 
started out to enforce and illustrate. He is 
as didactic as Wordsworth, and is thinking 
of himself the whole time. He belonged, 
moreover, to that class of professionals who 
are always particularly self-centred, auto- 
cratic, vain, and florid, — the class of quacks. 
There are, throughout society, men, and they 
are generally men of unusual natural powers, 
who, after gaining a little unassimilated 
education, launch out for themselves and 
set up as authorities on their own account. 
They are, perhaps, the successors of the old 

122 



WALT WHITMAN 

astrologers, in that what they seek to estab- 
lish is some personal professorship or pre- 
dominance. The old occultism and mystery 
was resorted to as the most obvious device 
for increasing the personal importance of 
the magician; and the chief difference to- 
day between a regular physician and a quack 
is, that the quack pretends to know it all. 

Brigham Young and Joseph Smith were 
men of phenomenal capacity, who actually 
invented a religion and created a community 
by the apparent establishment of supernatu- 
ral and occult powers. The phrenologists, 
the venders of patent medicine, the Chris- 
tian Scientists, the single-taxers, and all 
who proclaim panaceas and nostrums make 
the same majestic and pontifical appeal to 
human nature. It is this mystical power, 
this religious element, which floats them, 
sells the drugs, cures the sick, and packs 
the meetings. 

By temperament and education Walt Whit- 
man was fitted to be a prophet of this kind. 
He became a quack poet, and hampered his 
talents by the imposition of a monstrous 
parade of rattletrap theories and professions. 
If he had not been endowed with a perfectly 
marvellous capacity, a wealth of nature be- 
yond the reach and plumb of his rodomon- 
123 



WALT WHITMAN 



tade, he would have been ruined from the 
start. As it is, he has filled his work with 
grimace and vulgarity. He writes a few 
lines of epic directness and cyclopean vigor 
and naturalness, and then obtrudes himself 
and his mission. 

He has the bad taste bred in the bone of 
all missionaries and palmists, the sign- 
manual of a true quack. This bad taste is 
nothing more than the offensive intrusion of 
himself and his mission into the matter in 
hand. As for his real merits and his true 
mission, too much can hardly be said in his 
favor. The field of his experience was nar- 
row, and not in the least intellectual. It 
was narrow because of his isolation from 
human life. A poet like Browning, or 
Heine, or Alfred de Musset deals constantly 
with the problems and struggles that arise 
in civilized life out of the close relation- 
ships, the ties, the duties and desires of the 
human heart. He explains life on its social 
side. He gives us some more or less cohe- 
rent view of an infinitely complicated matter. 
He is a guide-book or a note-book, a highly 
trained and intelligent companion. 

Walt Whitman has no interest in any of 
these things. He was fortunately so very 
ignorant and untrained that his mind was 
124 



WALT WHITMAN 

utterly incoherent and unintellectual. His 
mind seems to be submerged and to have 
become almost a part of his body. The utter 
lack of concentration which resulted from 
living his whole life in the open air has left 
him spontaneous and unaccountable. And 
the great value of his work is, that it rep- 
resents the spontaneous and unaccountable 
functioning of the mind and body in health. 

It is doubtful whether a man ever enjoyed 
life more intensely than Walt Whitman, or 
expressed the physical joy of mere living 
more completely. He is robust, all tingling 
with health and the sensations of health. 
All that is best in his poetry is the expres- 
sion of bodily well-being. 

A man who leaves his office and gets into 
a canoe on a Canadian river, sure of ten 
days' release from the cares of business and 
housekeeping, has a thrill of joy such as 
Walt Whitman has here and there thrown 
into his poetry. One might say that to have 
done this is the greatest accomplishment in 
literature. Walt Whitman, in some of his 
lines, breaks the frame of poetry and gives 
us life in the throb. 

It is the throb of the whole physical sys- 
tem of a man who breathes the open air and 
feels the sky over him. " When lilacs last 
125 



WALT WHITMAN 

in the dooryard bloomed " is a great lyric. 
Here is a whole poem without a trace of 
self-consciousness. It is little more than 
a description of nature. The allusions to 
Lincoln and to the funeral are but a word 
or two — merest suggestions of the tragedy. 
But grief, overwhelming grief, is in every 
line of it, the grief which has been trans- 
muted into this sensitiveness to the land- 
scape, to the song of the thrush, to the 
lilac's bloom, and the sunset. 

Here is truth to life of the kind to be 
found in King Lear or Guy Mannering, in 
iEschylus or Burns. 

Walt Whitman himself could not have told 
you why the poem was good. Had he had 
any intimation of the true reason, he would 
have spoiled the poem. The recurrence and 
antiphony of the thrush, the lilac, the thought 
of death, the beauty of nature, are in a bal- 
ance and dream of natural symmetry such as 
no cunning could come at, no conscious art 
could do other than spoil. 

It is ungrateful to note Whitman's limita- 
tions, his lack of human passion, the false- 
ness of many of his notions about the 
American people, The man knew the world 
merely as an observer, he was never a living 
part of it, and no mere observer can under- 
126 



1 

1 
1 



WALT WHITMAN 

stand the life about him. Even his work 
during the war was mainly the work of an 
observer, and his poems and notes upon the 
period are picturesque. As to his talk about 
comrades and Manhattanese car-drivers, and 
brass-founders displaying their brawny arms 
round each other's brawny necks, all this 
gush and sentiment in Whitman's poetry is 
false to life. It has a lyrical value, as rep- 
resenting Whitman's personal feelings, but 
no one else in the country was ever found 
who felt or acted like this. 

In fact, in all that concerns the human 
relations Walt Whitman is as unreal as, let 
us say, William Morris, and the American 
mechanic would probably prefer Sigurd the 
Volsung, and understand it better than 
Whitman's poetry. 

This falseness to the sentiment of the 
American is interwoven with such won- 
derful descriptions of American sights and 
scenery, of ferryboats, thoroughfares, cata- 
racts, and machine-shops that it is not 
strange the foreigners should have accepted 
the gospel. 

On the whole, Whitman, though he solves 
none of the problems of life and throws no 
light on American civilization, is a delight- 
ful appearance, and a strange creature to 
127 



WALT WHITMAN 

come out of our beehive. This man com- 
mitted every unpardonable sin against our 
conventions, and his whole life was an out- 
rage. He was neither chaste, nor industri- 
ous, nor religious. He patiently lived upon 
cold pie and tramped the earth in triumph. 

He did really live the life he liked to live, 
in defiance of all men, and this is a great 
desert, a most stirring merit. And he gave, 
in his writings, a true picture of himself and 
of that life, — a picture which the world had 
never seen before, and which it is probable 
the world will not soon cease to wonder at. 



128 



A STUDY OF ROMEO 



A STUDY OF ROMEO 

The plays of Shakespeare marshal them- 
selves in the beyond. They stand in a place 
outside of our deduction. Their cosmos is 
greater than our philosophy. They are like 
the forces of nature and the operations of 
life in the vivid world about us. We may 
measure our intellectual growth by the new 
horizons we see opening within them. So 
long as they continue to live and change, to 
expand and deepen, to be filled with new 
harmony and new suggestion, we may rest 
content ; we are still growing. At the mo- 
ment we think we have comprehended them, 
at the moment we see them as stationary 
things, we may be sure something is wrong ; 
we are beginning to petrify. Our fresh 
interest in life has been arrested. There 
is, therefore, danger in an attempt to "size 
up " Shakespeare. We cannot help setting 
down as a coxcomb any man who has done 
it to his own satisfaction. He has pigeon- 
holed himself. He will not get lost. If 
131 



A STUDY OF ROMEO 

you want him, you can lay your hand on 
him. He has written an autobiography. 
He has " sized up " himself. 

In writing about Shakespeare, it is excus- 
able to put off the armor of criticism, and 
speak in a fragmentary and inconclusive 
manner, lest by giving way to conviction, 
by encouraging ourselves into positive be- 
liefs, we hasten the inevitable and grow old 
before our time. 

Perhaps some such apology is needed to 
introduce the observations on the character 
of Romeo which are here thrown together, 
and the remarks about the play itself, the 
acting, and the text. 

It is believed by some scholars that in the 
second quarto edition of Romeo and Juliet, 
published in 1599, Shakespeare's revising 
hand can be seen, and that the differences 
between the first and second editions show 
the amendments, additions, and corrections 
with which Shakespeare saw fit to embellish 
his work in preparing it for the press. If 
this were actually the case; if we could lay 
the two texts on the table before us, con- 
vinced that one of them was Shakespeare's 
draft or acting copy, and the other Shake- 
speare's finished work; and if, by comparing 
132 



A STUDY OF ROMEO 

the two, we could enter into the workshop 
and forge of his mind, — it would seem as if 
we had at last found an avenue of approach 
towards this great personality, this intellect 
the most powerful that has ever illumined 
human life. No other literary inquiry could 
compare in interest with such a study as 
this; for the relation which Shakespeare 
himself bore to the plays he created is one 
of the mysteries and blank places in his- 
tory, a gap that staggers the mind and which 
imagination cannot overleap. 

The student who examines both texts will 
be apt to conclude that the second is by no 
means a revised edition of the first, but that 
(according to another theory) the first is a 
pirated edition of the play, stolen by the 
printer, and probably obtained by means of 
a reporter who took down the lines as they 
were spoken on the stage. The stage direc- 
tions in the first edition are not properly the 
stage directions of a dramatist as to what 
should be done on the stage, but seem rather 
the records of an eye-witness as to what he 
saw happen on the stage. The mistakes of 
the reporter (or the perversions of the actors) 
as seen in the first edition generally injure 
the play; and it was from this circumstance 
— the frequency of blotches in the first edi- 
i33 



A STUDY OF ROMEO 

tion — that the idea gained currency that the 
second edition was an example of Shake- 
speare's never-failing tact in bettering his 
own lines. 

Perhaps, after all, it would little advance 
our understanding of the plays, or solve the 
essential puzzle, — that they actually had an 
author, — if we could follow every stroke of 
his revising pen. We should observe, no 
doubt, refinement of characterization, changes 
of stage effect, the addition of flourishes and 
beauties ; but their origin and true meaning, 
the secret of their life, would be as safe as 
it is at present, as securely lost in the midst 
of all this demonstration as the manuscripts 
themselves were in the destruction of the 
Globe Theatre. 

If we must then abandon the hope of see- 
ing Shakespeare in his workshop, we may, 
nevertheless, obtain from the pirated text 
some notion of the manner in which Shake- 
speare was staged in his own day, and of how 
he fared at the hands of the early actors. 
Romeo and Juliet is an exceptionally diffi- 
cult play to act, and the difficulties seem to 
have been about the same in Shakespeare's 
time as they are to-day. They are, in fact, 
inherent in the structure of the work itself. 

As artists advance in life, they develop, 
i34 






A STUDY OF ROMEO 

by growing familiar with the conditions of 
their art, the power of concealing its limita- 
tions, — a faculty in which even the greatest 
artists are often deficient in their early years. 
There is an anecdote of Schumann which 
somewhat crudely illustrates this. It is said 
that in one of his early symphonies he intro- 
duced a passage leading up to a climax, at 
which the horns were to take up the aria 
in triumph. At the rehearsal, when the 
moment came for the horns to trumpet forth 
their message of victory, there was heard a 
sort of smothered braying which made every- 
body laugh. The composer had arranged his 
climax so that it fell upon a note which the 
horns could not sound except with closed 
stops. The passage had to be rewritten. 
The young painter is frequently found strug- 
gling with subjects, with effects of light, 
which are almost impossible to render, and 
which perhaps an older man would not at- 
tempt. It is not surprising to find among 
the early works of Shakespeare that some of 
the characters, however true to life, — nay, 
because true to life, — are almost impossible 
to be represented on the stage. Certainly 
Romeo presents us with a character of the 
kind. 

Shakespeare's knowledge of human nature 
i35 



A STUDY OF ROMEO 

seems to have antedated his knowledge of 
the stage. In imagining the character of 
Romeo, a character to fit the plot of the old 
story, he took little thought for his actors. 
In conjuring up the probabilities which would 
lead a man into such a course of conduct as 
Romeo's, Shakespeare had in his mind the 
probabilities and facts in real life rather than 
the probabilities demanded by the stage. 

Romeo must be a man almost wholly made 
up of emotion, a creature very young, a lyric 
poet in the intensity of his sensations, a 
child in his helplessness beneath the ever- 
varying currents and whirlpools of his feel- 
ing. He lives in a walking and frenzied 
dream, comes in contact with real life only 
to injure himself and others, and finally 
drives with the collected energy of his being 
into voluntary shipwreck upon the rocks of 
the world. 

This man must fall in love at first sight. 
He must marry clandestinely. He must be 
banished for having taken part in a street 
fight, and must return to slay himself upon 
the tomb of his beloved. 

Shakespeare, with his passion for realism, 
devotes several scenes at the opening of the 
play to the explanation of Romeo's state of 
mind. He will give us a rationalistic ac- 

i 3 6 



A STUDY OF ROMEO 

count of love at first sight by bringing on 
this young poet in a blind chaos of emotion 
owing to his rejection by a woman not other- 
wise connected with the story. It is per- 
fectly true that this is the best and perhaps 
the only explanation of love at first sight. 
The effect upon Romeo's very boyish, unreal, 
and almost unpleasant lovesickness of the 
rejection (for which we must always respect 
Rosaline) is to throw him, and all the un- 
stable elements of which he is made, into a 
giddy whirl, which, after a day or two, it 
will require only the glance of a pair of eyes 
to precipitate into the very elixir of true 
love. 

All this is true, but no audience cares 
about the episode or requires the explana- 
tion. Indeed, it jars upon the sentimental 
notion of many persons to this day, and in 
many stage versions it is avoided. 

These preparatory scenes bring out in a 
most subtle way the egoism at the basis of 
Romeo's character, — the same lyrical egoism 
that is in all his language and in all his 
conduct. When we first see Romeo, he is 
already in an uneasy dream. He is wander- 
ing, aloof from his friends and absorbed in 
himself. On meeting Juliet he passes from 
his first dream into a second dream. On 
*37 



A STUDY OF ROMEO 

learning of the death of Juliet he passes into 
still a third and quite different dream, — or 
stage of dream, — a stage in which action is 
necessary, and in which he displays the cal- 
culating intellect of a maniac. The mental 
abstraction of Romeo continues even after 
he has met Juliet. In Capulet's garden, 
despite the directness of Juliet, he is still 
in his reveries. The sacred wonder of the 
hour turns all his thoughts, not into love, 
but into poetry. Juliet's anxieties are prac- 
tical. She asks him about his safety, how 
he came there, how he expects to escape. 
He answers in madrigals. His musings are 
almost impersonal. The power of the moon- 
light is over him, and the power of the scene, 
of which Juliet is only a part. 

" With love's light wings did I o'er-perch these walls ; 
For stony limits cannot hold love out, 
And what love can do that dares love attempt; 
Therefore thy kinsmen are no let to me. 

Lady, by yonder blessed moon I swear 

That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops — 

It is my soul that calls upon my name : 

How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night, 

Like softest music to attending ears." 

These reflections are almost " asides. " They 
ought hardly to be spoken aloud. They 

138 






A STUDY OF ROMEO 

denote that Romeo is still in his trance. 
They have, however, another and unfortu- 
nate influence: they retard the action of 
the play. As we read the play to our- 
selves, this accompaniment of lyrical feel- 
ing on Romeo's part does not interfere 
with our enjoyment. It seems to accentu- 
ate the more direct and human strain of 
Juliet's love. 

But on the stage the actor who plays 
Romeo requires the very highest powers. 
While speaking at a distance from Juliet, 
and in a constrained position, he must by 
his voice and gestures convey these subtlest 
shades of feeling, throw these garlands of 
verse into his talk without interrupting its 
naturalness, give all the "asides" in such a 
manner that the audience feels they are in 
place, even as the reader does. It is no 
wonder that the role of Romeo is one of 
the most difficult in all Shakespeare. The 
demands made upon the stage are almost 
more than the stage can meet. The truth to 
nature is of a kind that the stage is almost 
powerless to render. 

The character of Romeo cannot hope to 
be popular. Such pure passion, such un- 
reasonable giving way, is not easily forgiven 
in a man. He must roll on the floor and 
i39 



1 .V 1 



A STUDY OF ROMEO 

blubber and kick. There is no getting away 
from this. He is not Romeo unless he cries 
like a baby or a Greek hero. This is the 
penalty for being a lyric poet. Had he 
used his mind more upon the problems of 
his love, and less upon its celebration in 
petalled phrases, his mind would not have 
deserted him so lamentably in the hour of 
his need. In fact, throughout the play, 
Romeo, by the exigencies of the plot, is in 
fair danger of becoming contemptible. For 
one instant only does he rise into respecta- 
bility, — at the moment of his quarrel with 
Tybalt. At this crisis he is stung into life 
by the death of Mercutio, and acts like a 
man. The ranting manner in which it is 
customary to give Romeo's words in this 
passage of the play shows how far most actors 
are from understanding the true purport of 
the lines; how far from realizing that these 
few lines are the only opportunity the actor 
has of establishing the character of Romeo 
as a gentleman, a man of sense and courage, 
a formidable fellow, not unfit to be the hero 
of a play : — 

" Alive, in triumph ! and Mercutio slain ! 
Away to heaven, respective lenity, 
And fire-ey'd fury be my conduct now I 
Now, Tybalt, take the ' villain ' back again 
140 






A STUDY OF ROMEO 

That late thou gav'st me ; — for Mercutio's soul 
Is but a little way above our heads, 
Staying for thine to keep him company : 
Either thou, or I, or both, must go with him." 

The first three lines are spoken by Romeo 
to himself. They are a reflection, not a 
declamation, — a reflection upon which he 
instantly acts. He assumes the calmness 
of a man of his rank who is about to fight. 
More than this, Romeo, the man of words 
and moods, when once roused, as we shall 
see later, in a worser cause, — when once 
pledged to action, — Romeo shines with a 
sort of fatalistic spiritual power. He is 
now visibly dedicated to this quarrel. We 
feel sure that he will kill Tybalt in the en- 
counter. The appeal to the supernatural is 
in his very gesture. The audience — nay, 
Tybalt himself — gazes with awe on this 
sudden apparition of Romeo as a man of 
action. 

This highly satisfactory conduct is soon 
swept away by his behavior on hearing the 
news of his banishment. The boy seems to 
be without much stamina, after all. He is 
a pitiable object, and does not deserve the 
love of fair lady. 

At Mantua the tide. of his feelings has 
turned again, and by one of those natural 
141 



V 









A STUDY OF ROMEO 

reactions which he himself takes note of he 
wakes up unaccountably happy, " and all this 
day an unaccustom'd spirit lifts him above 
the ground with cheerful thoughts." It is 
the lightning before the thunderbolt. 

" Her body sleeps to Capel's monument, 
And her immortal part with angels lives. 
I saw her laid low in her kindred's vault, 
And presently took post to tell it you." 

Balthasar makes no attempt to break the 
news gently. The blow descends on Romeo 
when he least expects it. He is not spared. 
The conduct of Romeo on hearing of Juliet's 
death is so close to nature as to be nature 
itself, yet it happens to be conduct almost 
impossible to be given on the stage. He 
does nothing. He is stunned. He collapses. 
For fully five minutes he does not speak, 
and yet in these five minutes he must show 
to the audience that his nature has been 
shaken to its foundations. The delirium of 
miraculously beautiful poetry is broken. 
His words are gone. His emotion is para- 
lyzed, but his mind is alert. He seems sud- 
denly to be grown up, — a man, and not a 
boy, — and a man of action. " Is it even 
so ? " is all he says. He orders post-horses, 
ink and paper, in a few rapid sentences ; it 
142 



A STUDY OF ROMEO 

is evident that before speaking at all he has 
determined what he will do, and from now 
on to the end of the play Romeo is different 
from his old self, for a new Romeo has ap- 
peared. He is in a state of intense and 
calm exultation. All his fluctuating emo- 
tions have been stilled or stunned. He 
gives his orders in staccato. We feel that 
he knows what he is going to do, and will 
certainly accomplish it. Meanwhile his 
mind is dominant. It is preternaturally ac- 
tive. His "asides," which before were lyr- 
ical, now become the comments of an acute 
intellect. His vivid and microscopic recol- 
lection of the apothecary shop, his philo- 
sophical bantering with the apothecary, his 
sudden violence to Balthasar at the entrance 
to the tomb, and his as sudden friendliness, 
his words and conflict with Paris, whom he 
kills incidentally, absent-mindedly, and, as 
it were, with his left hand, without malice 
and without remorse, — all these things show 
an intellect working at high pressure, while 
the spirit of the man is absorbed in another 
and more important matter. 

There is a certain state of mind in which 

the will to do is so soon followed by the act 

itself that one may say the act is automatic. 

The thought has already begun to be exe- 

i43 






A STUDY OF ROMEO 

cuted even while it is being formed. This 
occurs especially where the intent is to do 
some horrid deed which requires preparation, 
firmness of purpose, ingenuity, and, above 
all, external calmness. 

" Between the acting of a dreadful thing 
And the first motion, all the interim is 
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream : 
The genius and the mortal instruments 
Are then in council ; and the state of man, 
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then 
The nature of an insurrection." 

This is the phase through which Romeo is 
passing on the way from Mantua to Verona. 
His own words give us a picture of him 
during that ride: — 

"What said my man when my betossed soul 
Did not attend him as we rode ? " 

He has come like an arrow, his mind closed 
to the external world, himself in the blind 
clutch of his own deadly purpose, driving on 
towards its fulfilment. Only at the end, 
when he stands before the bier of Juliet, 
sure of his will, beyond the reach of hin- 
drance, alone for the first time, — only then 
is his spirit released in floods of eloquence; 
then does his triumphant purpose break into 
speech, and his words soar up like the flames 
144 



A STUDY OF ROMEO 

of a great bonfire of precious incense stream- 
ing upward in exultation and in happiness. 

The whole course of these last scenes of 
Romeo's life, which are scarcely longer than 
this description of them, is in the highest 
degree naturalistic; but the scenes are in 
the nature of things so difficult to present 
on the stage as to be fairly impossible. The 
very long, the very minute description of 
the apothecary's shop, given by a man whose 
heart has stopped beating, but whose mind 
is at work more actively and more accurately 
than it has ever worked before, is a thing 
highly sane as to its words. It must be done 
quietly, rapidly, and yet the impression must 
be created, which is created upon Balthasar, 
that Romeo is not in his right mind. A 
friend seeing him would cross the street to 
ask what was the matter. 

The whole character of Romeo, from the 
beginning, has been imagined with reference 
to this self-destroying consummation. From 
his first speech we might have suspected that 
something destructive would come out of this 
man. 

There is a type of highly organized being, 
not well fitted for this world, whose practi- 
cal activities are drowned in a sea of feeling. 
Egoists by their constitution, they become 
10 i45 



A STUDY OF ROMEO 

dangerous beings when vexed, cornered, or 
thwarted by society. Their fine energies 
have had no training in the painful con- 
structive processes of civilization. Their 
first instincts, when goaded into activity, 
are instincts of destruction. They know no 
compromise. If they are not to have all, 
then no one shall possess anything. Romeo 
is not suffering in this final scene. He is 
experiencing the greatest pleasure of his life. 
He glories in his deed. It satisfies his soul. 
It gives him supreme spiritual activity. The 
deed brings widespread desolation, but to this 
he is indifferent, for it means the destruction 
of the prison against which his desires have 
always beaten their wings, the destruction of 
a material and social univerce from which he 
has always longed to be free. 

" O, here 
Will I set up my everlasting rest, 
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars 
From this world-wearied flesh." 






How much of all this psychology may we 
suppose was rendered apparent to the motley 
collection of excitable people who flocked to 
see the play — which appears to have been a 
popular one — in the years 1591-97? Prob- 
ably as much as may be gathered by an audi- 
146 



A STUDY OF ROMEO 

ence to-day from a tolerable representation 
of the piece. The subtler truths of Shake- 
speare have always been lost upon the stage. 
In turning over the first quarto of Romeo 
and Juliet, we may see that many such mat- 
ters were pruned ruggedly off by the actors. 
The early audiences, like the popular audi- 
ences of to-day, doubtless regarded action 
as the first merit of a play, and the stage 
managers must have understood this. It is 
noticeable that, in the authentic text, the 
street fight with which this play opens is a 
carefully-worked-up scene, which comes to 
a climax in the entry of the prince. The 
reporter gives a few words only to a descrip- 
tion of the scene. No doubt, in Shake- 
speare's time, the characters spoke very rapidly 
or all at once. It is impossible that the 
longer plays, like King Lear, should have 
been finished in an evening, unless the 
scenes moved with a hurry of life very 
different from the declamatory leisure with 
which our actors move from scene to scene. 
To make plain the course of the story was 
evidently the chief aim of the stage man- 
agers. The choruses are finger-posts. It is 
true that the choruses in Shakespeare are 
generally so overloaded with curious orna- 
ment as to be incomprehensible except as 
i47 



A STUDY OF ROMEO 

explanations of things already understood. 
The prologue to Romeo and Juliet is a riddle 
to which the play is the answer. One might 
at first suppose that the need of such finger- 
posts betrayed a dull audience, but no dull 
person was ever enlightened by Shakespeare's 
choruses. They play variations on the theme. 
They instruct only the instructed. 

If interest in the course of the story be the 
first excitement to the theatre-goer, interest 
in seeing a picture of contemporary manners 
is probably the second. Our chief loss in 
reading Shakespeare is the loss of the society 
he depicts, and which we know only through 
him. In every line and scene there must 
be meanings which have vanished forever 
with the conditions on which they comment. 
A character on the stage has need, at the 
feeblest, of only just so much vitality as will 
remind us of something we know in real life. 
The types of Shakespeare which have been 
found substantial enough to survive the loss 
of their originals must have had an interest 
for the first audiences, both in nature and in 
intensity, very different from their interest to 
us. The high life depicted by Shakespeare 
has disappeared. No one of us has ever 
known a Mercutio. Fortunately, the types 
of society seem to change less in the lower 



\ 



A STUDY OF ROMEO 

orders than in the upper classes. England 
swarms with old women like Juliet's nurse; 
and as to these characters in Shakespeare 
whose originals still survive, and as to them 
only, we may feel that we are near the 
Elizabethans. 

We should undoubtedly suffer some disen- 
chantment by coming in contact with these 
coarse and violent people. How much do 
the pictures of contemporary England given 
us by the novelists stand in need of correc- 
tion by a visit to the land ! How different 
is the thing from the abstract ! Or, to put 
the same thought in a more obvious light, 
how fantastic are the ideas of the Germans 
about Shakespeare! How Germanized does 
he come forth from their libraries and from 
their green-rooms ! 

We in America, with our formal manners, 
our bloodless complexions, our perpetual 
decorum and self-suppression, are about as 
rnuch in sympathy with the real element of 
Shakespeare's plays as a Baptist parson is 
with a fox-hunt. Our blood is stirred by 
the narration, but our constitution could 
never stand the reality. As we read we 
translate all things into the dialect of our 
province; or if we must mouth, let us say 
that we translate the dialect of the English 
149 



A STUDY OF ROMEO 

province into the language of our empire; 
but we still translate. Mercutio, on inspec- 
tion, would turn out to be not a gentleman, 
— and indeed he is not; Juliet, to be a most 
extraordinary young person ; Tybalt, a brute 
and ruffian, a type from the plantation; and 
the only man with whom we should feel at 
all at ease would be the County Paris, in 
whom we should all recognize a perfectly 
bred man. "What a man!" we should cry. 
" Why, he 's a man of wax ! " 



JS 



MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 



MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 



Michael Angelo is revealed by his son- 
nets. He wears the triple crown of painter, 
poet, and sculptor, and his genius was wor- 
shipped with a kind of awe even while he 
lived, yet we know the man best through 
these little pieces of himself which he broke 
off and gave to his friends. The fragments 
vibrated with the life of the man, and 
were recognized as wonderful things. Even 
in his lifetime they were treasured and col- 
lected in manuscript, and at a later day they 
were seized upon by the world at large. 

The first published edition of the son- 
nets was prepared for the press many 
years after the death of the author by his 
grandnephew, who edited them to suit the 
taste of the seventeenth century. The ex- 
tent and atrocity of his emendations can be 
realized by a comparison of texts. But the 
sonnets survived the improvements, and even 
made headway under them; and when, in 
1863, Guasti gave the original readings to 
153 



MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 






the public, the world was prepared for them. 
The bibliography of editions and transla- 
tions which Guasti gives is enough to show 
the popularity of the sonnets, their universal 
character, their international currency. 

There are upward of one hundred sonnets 
in every stage of perfection, and they have 
given rise not only to a literature of transla- 
tions, but to a literature of comment. Some 
years ago Mrs. Ednah Cheney published a 
selection of the sonnets, giving the Italian 
text, together with English translations by 
various hands. This little volume has earned 
the gratitude of many to whom it made known 
the sonnets. The Italians themselves have 
gone on printing the corrupt text in con- 
tempt of Guasti 's labors. But it has not 
been left to the Italians to protect the treas- 
ures of their land. The barbarians have 
been the devoutest worshippers at all times. 
The last tribute has come from Mr. John 
Addington Symonds, who has done the son- 
nets into the English of the pre-Raphaelites, 
and done them, on the whole, amazingly 
well. His translations of the more graceful 
sonnets are facile, apt, and charming, and rise 
at times into beauty. He has, however, in- 
sisted on polishing the rugged ones. More- 
over, being deficient in reverence, Mr. 
J 54 



MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 

Symonds fails to convey reverence. Never- 
theless, to have boldly planned and carried 
out the task of translating them all was an 
undertaking of so much courage, and has 
been done with so much success, that every 
rival must give in his admiration. 

The poems are exceedingly various, some 
being rough and some elegant, some obvious 
and some obscure, some humorous, some 
religious. Yet they have this in common, 
that each seems to be the bearer of some 
deep harmony, whose vibrations we feel and 
whose truth we recognize. From the very 
beginning they seem to have had a provoca- 
tive and stimulating effect upon others ; ever 
since they were written, cultivated people 
have been writing essays about them. One 
of them has been the subject of repeated aca- 
demical disquisition. They absorb and reflect 
the spirit of the times; they appeal to and 
express the individual; they have done this 
through three centuries and throughout who 
shall say how many different educational 
conditions. Place them in what light you 
will, they gleam with new meanings. This 
is their quality. It is hard to say whence 
the vitality comes. They have often a bril- 
liancy that springs from the juxtaposition 
of two thoughts, — a brilliancy like that pro- 
J 55 



MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 



duced by unblended colors roughly but well 
laid on. They have, as it were, an organic 
force which nothing can render. The best 
of them have the reflective power which gives 
back light from the mind of the reader. The 
profounder ones appear to change and glow 
under contemplation ; they re-echo syllables 
from forgotten voices ; they suggest unfathom- 
able depths of meaning. These sonnets are 
protean in character ; they represent different 
things to different people, — religion to one, 
love to another, philosophy to a third. 

It is easy to guess what must be the fate 
of such poems in translation. The transla- 
tor inevitably puts more of himself than of 
Michael Angelo into his version. Even the 
first Italian editor could not let them alone. 
He felt he must dose them with elegance. 
This itching to amend the sonnets results 
largely from the obscurity of the text. A 
translator is required to be, above all things, 
comprehensible, and, therefore, he must 
interpret, he must paraphrase. He is not 
at liberty to retain the equivocal sugges- 
tiveness of the original. The language of a 
translation must be chastened, or, at least, 
grammatical, and Michael Angelo's verse is 
very often neither the one nor the other. 

The selections which follow are not given 
156 



MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 

as representative of the different styles in 
the original. They have been chosen from 
among those sonnets which seemed most 
capable of being rendered into English. 

The essential nature of the sonnet is re- 
plete with difficulty, and special embarrass- 
ments are encountered in the Italian sonnet. 
The Italian sonnet is, both in its form and 
spirit, a thing so foreign to the English idea 
of what poetry should be, that no cultivation 
can ever domesticate it into the tongue. The 
seeds of flowers from the Alps may be 
planted in our gardens, but a new kind of 
flower will come up; and this is what has 
happened over and over again to the skilled 
gardeners of English literature in their 
struggles with the Italian sonnet. In Italy, 
for six hundred years, the sonnet has been 
the authorized form for a disconnected re- 
mark of any kind. Its chief aim is not so 
much to express a feeling as an idea — a 
witticism — a conceit — a shrewd saying — a 
clever analogy — a graceful simile — a beau- 
tiful thought. Moreover, it is not primarily 
intended for the public; it has a social rather 
than a literary function. 

The English with their lyrical genius have 
impressed the form, as they have impressed 
every other form, into lyrical service, and 
J57 



MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 

with some success, it must be admitted. But 
the Italian sonnet is not lyrical. It is con- 
versational and intellectual, and many things 
which English instinct declares poetry ought 
not to be. We feel throughout the poetry 
of the Latin races a certain domination of 
the intelligence which is foreign to our own 
poetry. But in the sonnet form at least we 
may sympathize with this domination. Let 
us read the Italian sonnets, then, as if they 
were prose ; let us seek first the thought and 
hold to that, and leave the eloquence to take 
care of itself. It is the thought, after all, 
which Michael Angelo himself cared about. 
He is willing to sacrifice elegance, to trun- 
cate words, to wreck rhyme, prosody, and 
grammar, if he can only hurl through the 
verse these thoughts whicn were his con- 
victions. 

The platonic ideas about life and love 
and art, which lie at the bottom of most of 
these sonnets, are familiar to us all. They 
have been the reigning commonplace ideas 
of educated people for the last two thousand 
years. But in these sonnets they are touched 
with new power; they become exalted into 
mystical importance. We feel almost as if 
it were Plato himself that is talking, and the 
interest is not lessened when we remember 



MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 

that it is Michael Angelo. It is necessary 
to touch on this element in the sonnets, for 
it exists in them ; and because while some 
will feel chiefly the fiery soul of the man, 
others will be most struck by his great 
speculative intellect. 

It is certain that the sonnets date from 
various times in Michael Angelo' s life; and, 
except in a few cases, it must be left to the 
instinct of the reader to place them. Those 
which were called forth by the poet's friend- 
ship for Vittoria Colonna were undoubtedly 
written towards the close of his life. While 
he seems to have known Vittoria Colonna 
and to have been greatly attached to her for 
many years, it is certain that in his old age 
he fell in love with her. The library of 
romance that has been written about this 
attachment has added nothing to Condivi's 
simple words : — ■ 

" He greatly loved the Marchesana of 
Pescara, with whose divine spirit he fell in 
love, and was in return passionately beloved 
of her ; and he still keeps many of her let- 
ters, which are full of most honest and ten- 
derest love, such as used to issue from a 
heart like hers ; and he himself had written 
her many and many a sonnet full of wit and 
tenderness. She often left Viterbo and other 
J 59 



MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 

places, where she had gone for pleasure, and 
to pass the summer, and came to Rome for 
no other reason than to see Michael Angelo. 
And in return he bore her so much love 
that I remember hearing him say that he 
regretted nothing except that when he went 
to see her on her death-bed he had not kissed 
her brow and her cheek as he had kissed her 
hand. He was many times overwhelmed at 
the thought of her death, and used to be as 
one out of his mind." 

It seems, from reading the sonnets, that 
some of those which are addressed to women 
must belong to a period anterior to his friend- 
ship with Vittoria. This appears from the 
internal evidence of style and feeling, as 
well as by references in the later sonnets. 

One other fact must be mentioned, — both 
Vittoria and Michael Angelo belonged to, 
or at least sympathized with, the Piagnoni, 
and were in a sense disciples of Savonarola. 
Now, it is this religious element which makes 
Michael Angelo seem to step out of his 
country and out of his century and across 
time and space into our own. This reli- 
gious feeling is of a kind perfectly familiar 
to us ; indeed, of a kind inborn and native 
to us. Whether we be reading the English 
prayer-book or listening to the old German 
160 



MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 

Passion Music, there is a certain note of the 
spirit which, when we hear it, we perfectly 
recognize as a part of ourselves. What we 
recognize is, in fact, the Protestantism which 
swept over Europe during the century of 
Michael Angelo's existence; which con- 
quered Teutonic Europe, and was conquered, 
but not extinguished, in Latin Europe ; and 
a part of which survives in ourselves. If 
one wishes to feel the power of Savonarola, 
one may do so in these sonnets. We had 
connected Michael Angelo with the Renais- 
sance, but we are here face to face with the 
Reformation. We cannot help being a little 
surprised at this. We cannot help being 
surprised at finding how well we know this 
man. 

Few of us are familiar enough with the 
language of the plastic arts to have seen 
without prompting this same modern ele- 
ment in Michael Angelo's painting and 
sculpture. We might, perhaps, have recog- 
nized it in the Pieta in St. Peter's. We 
may safely say, however, that it exists in all 
his works. It is in the Medicean statues; 
it is in the Julian marbles; it is in the 
Sistine ceiling. What is there in these 
figures that they leave us so awestruck, that 
they seem so like the sound of trumpets 
ii 161 



II 












MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 

blowing from a spiritual world? The in- 
telligence that could call them forth, the 
craft that could draw them, have long since 
perished. But the meaning survives the 
craft. The lost arts retain their power over 
us. We understand but vaguely, yet we are 
thrilled. We cannot decipher the signs, yet 
we subscribe to their import. The world 
from which Michael Angelo's figures speak 
is our own world, after all. That is the 
reason they are so potent, so intimate, so 
inimitably significant. We may be sure 
that the affinity which we feel with Michael 
Angelo, and do not feel with any other artist 
of that age, springs from experiences and 
beliefs in him which are similar to our 
own. 

His work speaks to the moral sense more 
directly and more powerfully than that of 
any one, — so directly and so powerfully, 
indeed, that we whose physical senses are 
dull, and whose moral sense is acute, are 
moved by Michael Angelo, although the rest 
of the cinque cento culture remain a closed 
book to us. 

It is difficult, this conjuring with the un- 
recoverable past, so rashly done by us all. 
Yet we must use what light we have. Re- 
membering, then, that painting is not the 
162 



MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 

reigning mode of expression in recent times, 
and that in dealing with it we are dealing 
with a vehicle of expression with which we 
are not spontaneously familiar, we may yet 
draw conclusions which are not fantastic, if 
we base them upon the identity of one man's 
nature some part of which we are sure we 
understand. We may throw a bridge from 
the ground in the sonnets, upon which we 
are sure we stand firmly, to the ground in 
the frescos, which, by reason of our own 
ignorance, is less certain ground to us, and 
we may walk from one side to the other amid 
the elemental forces of this same man's 
mind. 

XXXVIII 

Give me again, ye fountains and ye streams, 

That flood of life, not yours, that swells your front 
Beyond the natural fulness of your wont. 

I gave, and I take back as it beseems. 

And thou dense choking atmosphere on high 
Disperse thy fog of sighs — for it is mine, 
And make the glory of the sun to shine 

Again on my dim eyes. — O, Earth and Sky 

Give me again the footsteps I have trod. 

Let the paths grow where I walked them bare, 
The echoes where I waked them with my prayer 

Be deaf — and let those eyes — those eyes, O God, 

Give me the light I lent them. — That some soul 

May take my love. Thou hadst no need of it. 
163 



i 



I 



MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 

This rough and exceedingly obscure son- 
net, in which strong feeling has condensed 
and distorted the language, seems to have 
been written by a man who has been in love 
and has been repulsed. The shock has re- 
stored him to a momentary realization of the 
whole experience. He looks at the land- 
scape, and lo ! the beauty has dropped out of 
it. The stream has lost its power, and the 
meadow its meaning. Summer has stopped. 
His next thought is: "But it is I who had 
lent the landscape this beauty. That land- 
scape was myself, my dower, my glory, my 
birthright," and so he breaks out with " Give 
me back the light I threw upon you," and so 
on till the bitter word flung to the woman in 
the last line. The same clearness of thought 
and obscurity of expression and the same pas- 
sion is to be found in the famous sonnet — 
" Non ha V ottimo artista alcun concetto" — 
where he blames himself for not being able to 
obtain her good-will — as a bad sculptor who 
cannot hew out the beauty from the rock, al- 
though he feels it to be there ; and in that 
heart-breaking one where he says that people 
may only draw from life what they give to 
it, and says no good can come to a man who, 
looking on such great beauty, feels such pain. 

It is not profitable, nor is it necessary for 
164 







MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 

the comprehension of the poems, to decide 
to whom or at what period each one was 
written. There is dispute about some of 
them as to whether they were addressed to 
men or women. There is question as to 
others whether they are prayers addressed 
to Christ or love poems addressed to Vittoria. 
In this latter case, perhaps, Michael Angelo 
did not himself know which they were. 

Vittoria used to instruct him in religion, 
and he seems to have felt for her a love so 
deep, so reverent, so passionate, and so touch- 
ing that the words are alive in which he 
mentions her. 

"I wished," he writes beneath a sonnet 
which he sent her, evidently in return for 
some of her own religious poems, " I wished, 
before taking the things that you had many 
times deigned to give me, in order that I 
might receive them the less unworthily, to 
make something for you from my own hand. 
But then, remembering and knowing that the 
grace of God may not be bought, and that 
to accept it reluctantly is the greatest sin, I 
confess my fault, and willingly receive the 
said things, and when they shall arrive, not 
because they are in my house, but I myself 
as being in a house of theirs, shall deem 
myself in Paradise." 

16S 



MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 

We must not forget that at this time 

Michael Angelo was an old man, that he 

carried about with him a freshness and vigor 

of feeling that most people lose with their 

youth. A reservoir of emotion broke loose 

within him at a time when it caused his 

hale old frame suffering to undergo it, and 

reillumined his undimmed intellect to cope 

with it. A mystery play was enacted in 

him, — each sonnet is a scene. There is the 

whole of a man in each of many of these 

sonnets. They do not seem so much like 

poems as like microcosms. They are ele- 

^ mentally comp!ete. The soul of man could 

I be evolved again from them if the formula 

were lost. 

XL 

I know not if it be the longed for light 
Of its creator which the soul perceives, 
Or if in people's memory there lives 

A touch of early grace that keeps them bright 

Or else ambition, — or some dream whose might 
Brings to the eyes the hope the heart conceives 
And leaves a burning feeling when it leaves — 

That tears are welling in me as I write. 

The things I feel, the things I follow and the things 
I seek — are not in me, — I hardly know the place 
To find them. It is others make them mine. 
It happens when I see thee — and it brings 

Sweet pain — a yes, — a no, — sorrow and grace 

Surely it must have been those eyes of thine. 

166 



I 



MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 

There are others which give a most touch- 
ing picture of extreme piety in extreme old 
age. And there are still others which are 
both love poems and religious poems at the 
same time. 

LV 

Thou knowest that I know that thou dost know 
How, to enjoy thee, I did come more near. 
Thou knowest, I know thou knowest — I am here. 

Would we had given our greetings long ago. 

If true the hope thou hast to me revealed, 
If true the plighting of a sacred troth, 
Let the wall fall that stands between us both, 

For griefs are doubled when they are concealed. 

If, loved one, — if I only loved in thee 
What thou thyself dost love, — 't is to this end 
The spirit with his beloved is allied. 

The things thy face inspires and teaches me 
Mortality doth little comprehend. 
Before we understand we must have died. 

LI 

Give me the time when loose the reins I flung 

Upon the neck of galloping desire. 
Give me the angel face that now among 

The angels, — tempers Heaven with its fire. 
Give the quick step that now is grown so old, 

The ready tears — the blaze at thy behest, 
If thou dost seek indeed, O Love ! to hold 

Again thy reign of terror in my breast. 
If it be true that thou dost only live 

Upon the sweet and bitter pains of man 
167 



!! 









MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 

Surely a weak old man small food can give 

Whose years strike deeper than thine arrows can. 
Upon life's farthest limit I have stood — 
What folly to make fire of burnt wood. 

The occasion of the following was prob- 
ably some more than wonted favor shown to 
him by Vittoria. 

XXVI. 

Great joy no less than grief doth murder men. 
The thief, even at the gallows, may be killed 
If, while through every vein with fear he 's chilled, 

Sudden reprieve do set him free again. 

Thus hath this bourty from you in my pain 
Through all my griefs and sufferings fiercely thrilled, 
Coming from a breast with sovereign mercy filled, 

And more than weeping, cleft my heart in twain. 

Good news, like bad, may bring the taker death. 
The heart is rent as with the sharpest knife, 
Be it pressure or expansion cause the rift. 
Let thy great beauty which God cherisheth 
Limit my joy if it desire my life — 
The unworthy dies beneath so great a gift. 

XXVIII 



The heart is not the life of love like mine. 
The love I love thee with has none of it. 
For hearts to sin and mortal thought incline 
And for love's habitation are unfit. 
God, when our souls were parted from Him, made 
Of me an eye — of thee, splendor and light. 
168 






MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 

Even in the parts of thee which are to fade 

Thou hast the glory ; I have only sight. 

Fire from its heat you may not analyze, 

Nor worship from eternal beauty take, 

Which deifies the lover as he bows. 

Thou hast that Paradise all within thine eyes 

Where first I loved thee. 'T is for that love's sake 

My soul's on fire with thine, beneath thy brows. 

The German musicians of the seventeenth 
century used to write voluntaries for the 
organ, using the shorthand of the older nota- 
tion ; they jotted down the formulas of the 
successive harmonies expressed in terms of 
the chords merely. The transitions and the 
musical explanation were left to the indi- 
vidual performer. And Michael Angelo has 
left behind him, as it were, the poetical 
equivalents of such shorthand musical for- 
mulas. The harmonies are wonderful. The 
successions show a great grasp of compre- 
hension, but you cannot play them without 
filling them out. 

"Is that music, after all," one may ask, 
"which leaves so much to the performer, 
and is that poetry, after all, which leaves so 
much to the reader? " It seems you must be 
a Kapellmeister or a student, or dilettante 
of some sort, before you can transpose and 
illustrate these hieroglyphics. There is some 
truth in this criticism, and the modesty of 
169 



II 












MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 

purpose in the poems is the only answer to 
it. They claim no comment. Comment 
claims them. Call them not poetry if you 
will. They are a window which looks in 
upon the most extraordinary nature of modern 
times, — a nature whose susceptibility to 
impressions of form through the eye allies 
it to classical times; a nature which on the 
emotional side belongs to our own day. 

Is it a wonder that this man was venerated 
with an almost superstitious regard in Italy, 
and in the sixteenth century? His creations 
were touched with a superhuman beauty 
which his contemporaries felt, yet charged 
with a profoundly human meaning which 
they could not fathom. No one epoch has 
held the key to him. There lives not a man 
and there never has lived a man who could 
say, "I fully understand Michael Angelo's 
works." It will be said that the same is 
true of all the very greatest artists, and so it 
is in a measure. But as to the others, that 
truth comes as an afterthought and an admis- 
sion. As to Michael Angelo, it is primary 
and overwhelming impression. " We are not 
sure that we comprehend him," say the cen- 
turies as they pass, " but of this we are sure : 
Simil ne maggior uom non nacque mai. " 



170 



THE FOURTH CANTO OF 
THE INFERNO 



THE FOURTH CANTO OF 
THE INFERNO 

There are many great works of fiction where 
the interest lies in the situation and develop- 
ment of the characters or in the wrought-up 
climax of the action, and where it is necessary 
to read the whole work before one can feel 
the force of the catastrophe. But Dante's 
poem is a series of disconnected scenes, held 
together only by the slender thread of the 
itinerary. The scenes vary in length from a 
line or two to a page or two ; and the power 
of them comes, one may say, not at all from 
their connection with each other, but entirely 
from the language in which they are given. 

A work of this kind is hard to translate 
because verbal felicities, to use a mild term, 
are untranslatable. What English words can 
render the mystery of that unknown voice 
that calls out of the deep, — 

" Onorate ? 1 altissimo poeta, 
Torna sua ombra che era dipartita " ? 

The cry breaks upon the night, full of awful 
greeting, proclamation, prophecy, and leaves 
173 



FOURTH CANTO OF INFERNO 






the reader standing next to Virgil, afraid now 
to lift up his eyes to the poet. Awe breathes 
in the cadence of the words themselves. And 
so with many of the most splendid lines in 
Dante, the meaning inheres in the very Italian 
words. They alone shine with the idea. 
They alone satisfy the spiritual vision. 

Of all the greatest poets, Dante is most 
foreign to the genius of the English race. 
From the point of view of English-speaking 
people, he is lacking in humor. It might 
seem at first blush as if the argument of his 
poem were a sufficient warrant for serious- 
ness ; but his seriousness is of a nature strange 
to northern nations. There is in it a gaunt 
and sallow earnestness which appears to us 
inhuman. 

In the treatment of the supernatural the 
Teutonic nations have generally preserved a 
touch of humor. This is so intrinsically true 
to the Teutonic way of feeling that the humor 
seems to go with and to heighten the terror of 
the supernatural. When Hamlet, in the scene 
on the midnight terrace, addresses the ghost 
as "old mole," u old truepenny," etc., we 
may be sure that he is in a frenzy of excite- 
ment and apprehension. Perhaps the expla- 
nation of this mixture of humor and terror, 
is that when the mind feels itself shaken to its 
i74 



FOURTH CANTO OF INFERNO 

foundations by the immediate presence of the 
supernatural, — palsied, as it were, with fear, — 
there comes to its rescue, and as an antidote 
to the fear itself, a reserve of humor, almost of 
levity. Staggered by the unknown, the mind 
opposes it with the homely and the familiar. 
The northern nations were too much afraid of 
ghosts to take them seriously. The sight of 
one made a man afraid he should lose his 
wits if he gave way to his fright. Thus it 
has come about that in the sincerest terror of 
the north there is a touch of grotesque humor ; 
and this touch we miss in Dante. The hundred 
cantos of his poem are unrelieved by a single 
scene of comedy. The strain of exalted 
tragedy is maintained throughout. His jests 
and wit are not of the laughing kind. Some- 
times they are grim and terrible, sometimes 
playful, but always serious and full of meaning. 
This lack of humor becomes very palpable 
in a translation, where it is not disguised by 
the transcendent beauty of Dante's style. 

There is another difficulty peculiar to the 
translating of Dante into English. English is 
essentially a diffuse and prodigal language. 
The great English writers have written with a 
free hand, prolific, excursive, diffuse. Shake- 
speare, Sir Thomas Browne, Sir Walter Scott* 
Robert Browning, all the typical writers of 
x 75 



FOURTH CANTO OF INFERNO 



English, have been many-worded. They have 
been men who said everything that came into 
their heads, and trusted to their genius to 
make their writings readable. The eighteenth 
century in England, with all its striving after 
classical precision, has left behind it no great 
laconic English classic who stands in the first 
rank. Our own Emerson is concise enough, 
but he is disconnected and prophetic. Dante 
is not only concise, but logical, deductive, 
prone to ratiocination. He set down nothing 
that he had not thought of a thousand times, 
and conned over, arranged, and digested. We 
have in English no prototype for such con- 
densation. There is no native work in the 
language written in anything which approaches 
the style of Dante. 

My heavy sleep a sullen thunder broke, 
So that I shook myself, springing upright, 
Like one awakened by a sudden stroke, 
And gazed with fixed eyes and new-rested sight 
Slowly about me, — awful privilege, — 
To know the place that held me, if I might. 
In truth I found myself upon the edge 
That girds the valley of the dreadful pit, 
Circling the infinite wailing with its ledge. 
Dark, deep, and cloudy, to the depths of it 
Eye could not probe, and though I bent mine low, 
It helped my vain conjecture not- a whit. 
" Let us go down to the blind world below," 
Began the poet, with a face like death, 
176 



FOURTH CANTO OF INFERNO 

" I shall go first, thou second." " Say not so," 
Cried I when I again could find my breath, 
For I had seen the whiteness of his face, 
" How shall I come if thee it frighteneth ? " 
And he replied : " The anguish of the place 
And those that dwell there thus hath painted me 
With pity, not with fear. But come apace ; 
The spur of the journey pricks us." Thus did he 
Enter himself, and take me in with him, 
Into the first great circle's mystery 
That winds the deep abyss about the brim. 

Here there came borne upon the winds to us, 
Not cries, but sighs that filled the concave dim, 
And kept the eternal breezes tremulous. 
The cause is grief, but grief unlinked to pain, 
That makes the unnumbered peoples suffer thus. 
I saw great crowds of children, women, men, 
Wheeling below. " Thou dost not seek to know 
What spirits are these thou seest? " Thus again 
My master spoke. " But ere we further go, 
Thou must be sure that these feel not the weight 
Of sin. They well deserved, — and yet not so. — 
They had not baptism, which is the gate 
Of Faith, — thou holdest. If they lived before 
The days of Christ, though sinless, in that state 
God they might never worthily adore. 
And I myself am such an one as these. 
For this shortcoming — on no other score — 
We are lost, and most of all our torment is 
That lost to hope we live in strong desire." 
Grief seized my heart to hear these words of his, 
Because most splendid souls and hearts of fire 
I recognized, hung in that Limbo there. 

12 I 77 



FOURTH CANTO OF INFERNO 

" Tell me, my master dear, tell me, my sire," 
Cried I at last, with eager hope to share 
That all-convincing faith, — " but went there not 
One, — once, — from hence, — made happy though it 

were 
Through his own merit or another's lot ? " 
" I was new come into this place," said he, 
Who seemed to guess the purport of my thought, 
" When Him whose brows were bound with Victory 
I saw come conquering through this prison dark. 
He set the shade of our first parent free, 
With Abel, and the builder of the ark, 
And him that gave the laws immutable, 
And Abraham, obedient patriarch, 
David the king, and ancient Israel, 
His father and his children at his side, 
And the wife Rachel that he loved so well, 
And gave them Paradise, — and before these men 
None tasted of salvation that have died." 



We did not pause while he was talking then, 
But held our constant course along the track, 
Where spirits thickly thronged the wooded glen. 
And we had reached a point whence to turn back 
Had not been far, when I, still touched with fear, 
Perceived a fire, that, struggling with the black, 
Made conquest of a luminous hemisphere. 
The place was distant still, but I could see 
Clustered about the fire, as we drew near, 
Figures of an austere nobility. 
" Thou who dost honor science and love art, 
Pray who are these, whose potent dignity 
Doth eminently set them thus apart? " 
The poet answered me, " The honored fame 
I7 8 



FOURTH CANTO OF INFERNO 

That made their lives illustrious touched the heart 

Of God to advance them." Then a voice there came, 

" Honor the mighty poet ; " and again, 

" His shade returns, — do honor to his name." 

And when the voice had finished its refrain, 

I saw four giant shadows coming on. 

They seemed nor sad nor joyous in their mien. 

And my good master said : " See him, my son, 

That bears the sword and walks before the rest, 

And seems the father of the three, — that one 

Is Homer, sovran poet. The satirist 

Horace comes next ; third, Ovid; and the last 

Is Lucan. The lone voice that name expressed 

That each doth share with me ; therefore they haste 

To greet and do me honor ; — nor do they wrong." 

Thus did I see the assembled school who graced 

The master of the most exalted song, 

That like an eagle soars above the rest. 

When they had talked together, though not long, 

They turned to me, nodding as to a guest. 

At which my master smiled, but yet more high 

They lifted me in honor. At their behest 

I went with them as of their company, 

And made the sixth among those mighty wits. 

Thus towards the light we walked in colloquy 
Of things my silence wisely here omits, 
As there 't was sweet to speak them, till we came 
To where a seven times circled castle sits, 
Whose walls are watered by a lovely stream. 
This we crossed over as it had been dry, 
Passing the seven gates that guard the same, 
And reached a meadow, green as Arcady. 
179 



FOURTH CANTO OF INFERNO 

People were there with deep, slow-moving eyes 
Whose looks were weighted with authority. 
Scant was their speech, but rich in melodies. 
The walls receding left a pasture fair, 
A place all full of light and of great size, 
So we could see each spirit that was there. 
And straight before my eyes upon the green 
Were shown to me the souls of those that were, 
Great spirits it exalts me to have seen. 
Electra with her comrades I descried, 
I saw ^Eneas, and knew Hector keen, 
And in full armor Caesar, falcon-eyed, 
Camilla and the Amazonian queen, 
King Latin with Lavinia at his side, 
Brutus that did avenge the Tarquin's sin, 
Lucrece, Cornelia, Martia Julia, 
And by himself the lonely Saladin. 

The Master of all thinkers next I saw 
Amid the philosophic family. 
All eyes were turned on him with reverent awe ; 
Plato and Socrates were next his knee, 
Then Heraclitus and Empedocles, 
Thales and Anaxagoras, and he 
That based the world on chance ; and next to these, 
Zeno, Diogenes, and that good leech 
The herb-collector, Dioscorides. 
Orpheus I saw, Livy and Tully, each 
Flanked by old Seneca's deep moral lore, 
Euclid and Ptolemy, and within their reach 
Hippocrates and Avicenna's store, 
The sage that wrote the master commentary, 
Averois, with Galen and a score 
Of great physicians. But my pen were weary 
Depicting all of that majestic plain 
Splendid with many an antique dignitary. 
180 



FOURTH CANTO OF INFERNO 

My theme doth drive me on, and words are vain 
To give the thought the thing itself conveys. 
The six of us were now cut down to twain. 
My guardian led me forth by other ways, 
Far from the quiet of that trembling wind, 
And from the gentle shining of those rays, 
To places where all light was left behind. 



181 



ROBERT BROWNING 



ROBERT BROWNING 

THERE is a period in the advance of any great 
man's influence between the moment when he 
appears and the moment when he has be- 
come historical, during which it is difficult 
to give any succinct account of him. We 
are ourselves a part of the . thing we would 
describe. The element which we attempt to 
isolate for purposes of study is still living 
within us. Our science becomes tinged with 
autobiography. Such must be the fate of 
any essay on Browning written at the present 
time. 

The generation to whom his works were 
unmeaning has hardly passed away. The 
generation he spoke for still lives. His in- 
fluence seems still to be expanding. The 
literature of Browning dictionaries, phrase- 
books, treatises, and philosophical studies 
grows daily. Mr. Cooke in his Guide to 
Browning (1893) gives a condensed cata- 
logue of the best books and essays on Brown- 
ing, which covers many finely printed pages. 
This class of book — the text-book — is not 
185 



ROBERT BROWNING 

the product of impulse. The text-book is a 
commercial article and follows the demand 
as closely as the reaper follows the crop. 
We can tell the acreage under cultivation by 
looking over the account books of the makers 
of farm implements. Thousands of people 
are now studying Browning, following in his 
footsteps, reading lives of his heroes, and 
hunting up the subjects he treated. 

This Browningism which we are disposed 
to laugh at is a most interesting secondary 
outcome of his influence. It has its roots 
in natural piety, and the educational value 
of it is very great. 

Browning's individuality created for him a 
personal following, and he was able to re- 
spond to the call to leadership. Unlike 
Carlyle, he had something to give his disci- 
ples beside the immediate satisfaction of a 
spiritual need. He gave them not only meal 
but seed. In this he was like Emerson; 
but Emerson's little store of finest grain is of 
a different soil. Emerson lived in a cottage 
and saw the stars over his head through his 
skylight. Browning, on the other hand, 
loved pictures, places, music, men and 
women, and his works are like the house of 
a rich man, — a treasury of plunder from 
many provinces and many ages, whose man- 
186 









ROBERT BROWNING 

ners and passions are vividly recalled to us. 
In Emerson's house there was not a peg to 
hang a note upon, — " this is his bookshelf, 
this his bed." But Browning's palace craves 
a catalogue. And a proper catalogue to 
such a palace becomes a liberal education. 

Robert Browning was a strong, glowing, 
whole-souled human being, who enjoyed life 
more intensely than any Englishman since 
Walter Scott. He was born among books; 
and circumstances enabled him to follow his 
inclinations and become a writer, — a poet by 
profession. He was, from early youth to 
venerable age, a centre of bounding vitality, 
the very embodiment of spontaneous life; 
and the forms of poetry in which he so fully 
and so accurately expressed himself enable 
us to know him well. Indeed, only great 
poets are known so intimately as we know 
Robert Browning. 

Religion was at the basis of his character, 
and it was the function of religious poetry 
that his work fulfilled. Inasmuch as no man 
invents his own theology, but takes it from 
the current world and moulds it to his needs, 
it was inevitable that Robert Browning should 
find and seize upon as his own all that was 
optimistic in Christian theology. Everything 
that was hopeful his spirit accepted; every- 
187 



ROBERT BROWNING 

thing that was sunny and joyful and good for 
the brave soul he embraced. What was dis- 
tressing he rejected or explained away. In 
the world of Robert Browning everything was 
| right. 

The range of subject covered by his poems 
is wider than that of any other poet that ever 
lived ; but the range of his ideas is exceed- 
ingly small. We need not apologize for 

^ treating Browning as a theologian and a 

doctor of philosophy, for he spent a long life 
in trying to show that a poet is always really 
both — and he has almost convinced us. 

\ The expositors and writers of text-books have 

had no difficulty in formulating his theology, 
for it is of the simplest kind ; and his views 
on morality and art are logically a part of it. 
The " message " which poets are convention- 
ally presumed to deliver, was, in Browning's 
case, a very definite creed, which may be 
found fully set forth in any one of twenty 
poems. Every line of his poetry is logically 
dedicated to it. 

He believes that the development of the 
individual soul is the main end of existence. 
The strain and stress of life are incidental to 
growth, and therefore desirable. Develop- 
ment and growth mean a closer union with 
God. In fact, God is of not so much import- 
188 






ROBERT BROWNING 

ance in Himself, but as the end towards 
which man tends. That irreverent person 
who said that Browning uses " God " as a 
pigment made an accurate criticism of his 
theology. In Browning, God is adjective to 
man. Browning believes that all conven- 
tional morality must be reviewed from the 
standpoint of how conduct affects the actor 
himself, and what effect it has on his individ- 
ual growth. The province of art and of all 
thinking and working is to make these truths 
clear and to grapple with the problems they 
give rise to. 

The first two fundamental beliefs of Brown- 
ing — namely: (i) that, ultimately speaking, 
the most important matter in the world is 
the soul of a man; and (2) that a sense of 
effort is coincident with development — are 
probably true. We instinctively feel them to 
be true, and they seem to be receiving support 
from those quarters of research to which we 
look for light, however dim. In the applica- 
tion of his dogmas to specific cases in the 
field of ethics, Browning often reaches conclu- 
sions which are fair subjects for disagreement. 
Since most of our conventional morality is 
framed to repress the individual, he finds him- 
self at war with it — in revolt against it. He 
is habitually pitted against it, and thus ac- 




ROBERT BROWNING 

quires modes of thought which sometimes 
lead him into paradox — at least, to conclu- 
sions at odds with his premises. It is in the 
course of exposition, and incidentally to his 
main purpose as a teacher of a few funda- 
mental ideas, that Browning has created his 
masterpieces of poetry. 

Never was there a man who in the course 
of a long life changed less. What as a boy 
he dreamed of doing, that he did. The 
thoughts of his earliest poems are the thoughts 
of his latest. His tales, his songs, his mono- 
logues, his dramas, his jests, his sermons, his 
rage, his prayer, are all upon the same theme : 
whatever fed his mind nourished these beliefs. 
His interest in the world was solely an inter- 
est in them. He saw them in history and in 
music; his travels and studies brought him 
back nothing else but proofs of them ; the 
universe in each of its manifestations was a 
commentary upon them. His nature was 
the simplest, the most positive, the least 
given to abstract speculation, which England 
can show in his time. He was not a thinker, 
for he was never in doubt. He had recourse 
to disputation as a means of inculcating truth, 
but he used it like a lawyer arguing a case. 
His conclusions are. fixed from the start. 
Standing, from his infancy, upon a faith as 
190 



ROBERT BROWNING 

absolute as that of a martyr, he has never for 
one instant undergone the experience of doubt, 
and only knows that there is such a thing 
because he has met with it in other people. 
The force of his feelings is so much greater 
than his intellect that his mind serves his 
soul like a valet. Out of the whole cosmos 
he takes what belongs to him and sustains 
him, leaving the rest, or not noting it. 

There never was a great poet whose scope 
was so definite. That is the reason why the 
world is so cleanly divided into people who do 
and who do not care for Browning. One real 
glimpse into him gives you the whole of him. 
The public which loves him is made up of 
people who have been through certain spiritual 
experiences to which he is the antidote. The 
public which loves him not consists of people 
who have escaped these experiences. To some 
he is a strong, rare, and precious elixir, which 
nothing else will replace. To others, who do 
not need him, he is a boisterous and eccen- 
tric person, — a Heracles in the house of 
mourning. 

Let us remember his main belief, — the 
value of the individual. The needs of society 
constantly require that the individual be sup- 
pressed. They hold him down and punish 
him at every point. The tyranny of order 
191 



f. 



ROBERT BROWNING 

and organization — of monarch or public 
opinion — weights him and presses him down. 
This is the inevitable tendency of all stable 
social arrangements. Now and again there 
arises some strong nature that revolts against 
the influence of conformity which is becoming 
intolerable, — against the atmosphere of caste 
or theory ; of Egyptian priest or Manchester 
economist ; of absolutism or of democracy. 

\ And this strong nature cries out that the 

souls of men are being injured, and that they 
are important; that your soul and my soul 
are more important than Caesar — or than 
the survival of the fittest. Such a voice was the 

j\ voice of Christ, and the lesser saviors of the 

world bring always a like message of revolt : 
they arise to fulfil the same fundamental need 
of the world. 

Carlyle, Emerson, Victor Hugo, Browning, 
were prophets to a generation oppressed in 
spirit, whose education had oppressed them 
with a Jewish law of Adam Smith and Jeremy 
Bentham and Malthus, of Clarkson and Cob- 
den, — of thought for the million, and for man 
in the aggregate. " To what end is all this 
beneficence, all this conscience, all this 
theory? " some one at length cries out. " For 
whom is it in the last analysis that you legis- 
late ? You talk of man, I see only men." 
192 




ROBERT BROWNING 

To men suffering from an age of devotion 
to humanity came Robert Browning as a lib- 
erator. Like Carlyle, he was understood first 
in this country because we had begun earlier 
with our theoretical and practical philanthro- 
pies, and had taken them more seriously. 
We had suffered more. We needed to be 
told that it was right to love, hate, and be 
angry, to sin and repent. It was a revelation 
to us to think that we had some inheritance 
in the joys and passions of mankind. We 
needed to be told these things as a tired child 
needs to be comforted. Browning gave them 
to us in the form of a religion. There was no 
one else sane or deep or wise or strong enough 
to know what we lacked. 

If ever a generation had need of a poet, — 
of some one to tell them they might cry and 
not be ashamed, rejoice and not find the rea- 
son in John Stuart Mill; some one who 
should justify the claims of the spirit which 
was starving on the religion of humanity, — it 
was the generation for whom Browning wrote. 

Carlyle had seized upon the French Revo- 
lution, which served his ends because it was 
filled with striking, with powerful, with gro- 
tesque examples of individual force. In his 
Hero Worship he gives his countrymen a 
philosophy of history based on nothing but 
13 193 



ROBERT BROWNING 

worship of the individual. Browning with the 
same end in view gave us pictures of the fif- 
teenth and sixteenth centuries in France and 
Italy. He glorified what we had thought 
crime and error, and made men of us. He 
was the apostle to the educated of a most 
complex period, but such as he was, he was 
complete. Those people to whom he has 
been a poet know what it is for the heart to 
receive full expression from the lips of an- 
other. 

The second thesis which Browning insists 
on — the identity of spiritual suffering with 
spiritual growth — is the one balm of the 
world. It is said that recent physiological 
experiment shows that muscles do not de- 
velop unless exercised up to what is called 
the " distress point." If this shall prove to 
be an instance of a general law, — if the strug- 
gles and agony of the spirit are really signs 
of an increase of that spiritual life which is 
the only sort of life we can conceive of now or 
hereafter, — then the truth-to-feeling of much 
of Browning's poetry has a scientific basis. 
It cannot be denied that Browning held firmly 
two of the most moving and far-reaching 
ideas of the world, and he expanded them in 
the root, leaf, flower, and fruit of a whole 
world of poetic disquisition. 
194 






ROBERT BROWNING 

It is unnecessary at this day to point out 
the beauties of Browning or the sagacity with 
which he chose his effects. He gives us the 
sallow wife of James Lee, whose soul is known 
to him, Pippa the silk-spinning girl, two men 
found in the morgue, persons lost, forgotten, 
or misunderstood. He searches the world 
till he finds the man whom everybody will 
concur in despising, the mediaeval gramma- 
rian, and he writes to him the most powerful 
ode in English, the mightiest tribute ever 
paid to a man. His culture and his learning 
are all subdued to what he works in; they 
are all in harness to draw his thought. He 
mines in antiquity or drags his net over Ger- 
man philosophy or modern drawing-rooms, — 
all to the same end. 

In that miracle of power and beauty — 
The Flight of the Duchess — he has im- 
provised a whole civilization in order to make 
the setting of contrast which shall cause the 
soul of the little duchess to shine clearly. In 
Childe Roland he creates a cycle, an epoch 
of romance and mysticism, because he re- 
quires it as a stage property. In A Death 
in the Desert you have the East in the first 
century — so vividly given that you wish in- 
stantly to travel there, Bible in hand, to feel 
the atmosphere with which your Bible ought 
195 



ROBERT BROWNING 

always to have been filled. His reading 
brings him to Euripides. He sees that Al- 
cestis can be set to his theme; and with a 
week or two of labor, while staying in a 
country house, he draws out of the Greek 
fable the world of his own meaning and shows 
it shining forth in a living picture of the Greek 
theatre which has no counterpart for vitality 
in any modern tongue. 

The descriptive and narrative powers of 
Browning are above, beyond, and outside of 
all that has been done in English in our time, 
as the odd moments prove which he gave to 
the Pied Piper, The Ride from Ghent to 
Aix, Incident in the French Camp. These 
chips from his workshop passed instantly into 
popular favor because they were written in 
familiar forms. 

How powerfully his gifts of utterance were 
brought to bear upon the souls of men will 
be recorded, even if never understood, by 
literary historians. It is idle to look to the 
present generation for an intelligible account 
of One Word More, Rabbi Ben Ezra, Pros- 
pice, Saul, The Blot on the 'Scutcheon. 
They must be judged by the future and by 
men who can speak of them with a steady 

up. 

It must be conceded that the conventional 
196 



ROBERT BROWNING 

judgments of society are sometimes right, 
and Browning's mission led him occasion- 
ally into paradox and jeux d y esprit. Bishop 
Blougram is an attempt to discover whether 
a good case cannot be made out for the in- 
dividual hypocrite. The Statue and the Bust 
is frankly a rednctio ad absurdum, and ends 
with a query. 

There is more serious trouble with others. 
The Grammarian's Funeral is false to fact, 
and will appear so to posterity. The gram- 
marian was not a hero, and our calmer mo- 
ments show us that the poem is not a great 
ode. It gave certain people the glow of a 
great truth, but it remains a paradox and a 
piece of exaggeration. The same must be 
said of a large part of Browning. The New 
Testament is full of such paradoxes of exag- 
geration, like the parable of the unjust stew- 
ard, the rich man's chance for heaven, the 
wedding garment; but in these, the truth is 
apparent, — we are not betrayed. In Brown- 
ing's paradoxes we are often led on and 
involved in an emotion over some situation 
which does not honestly call for the emotion. 

The most noble quality in Browning is 
his temper. He does not proceed, as libera- 
tors generally do, by railing and pulling 
down. He builds up; he is positive, not 
197 



ROBERT BROWNING 

negative. He is less bitter than Christianity 
itself. 

While there is no more doubt as to the 
permanent value of the content of Browning 
than of the value of the spiritual truths of the 
New Testament, there is very little likelihood 
that his poems will be understood in the re- 
mote future. At present, they are following 
the waves of influence of the education which 
they correct. They are built like Palladio's 
Theatre at Vicenza, where the perspective 
converges toward a single seat. In order to 
be subject to the illusion, the spectator must 
occupy the duke's place. The colors are 
dropping from the poems already. The fee- 
blest of them lose it first. There was a steady 
falling off in power accompanied by a con- 
stant increase in his peculiarities during the 
last twenty years of his life, and we may 
make some surmise as to how Balaustion's 
Adventure will strike posterity by reading 
Parleyings with Certain People. 

The distinctions between Browning's char- 
acters — which to us are so vivid — will to 
others seem less so. Paracelsus and Rabbi 
Ben Ezra, Lippo Lippi, Karshish, Capon- 
sacchi, and Ferishtah will all appear to be 
run in the same mould. They will seem to be 
the thinnest disguises which a poet ever as- 
ig8 



ROBERT BROWNING 

sumed. The lack of the dramatic element in 
Browning — a lack which is concealed from 
us by our intense sympathy for him and by his 
fondness for the trappings of the drama — will 
be apparent to the after-comers. They will 
say that all the characters in The Blot on 
the 'Scutcheon take essentially the same 
view of the catastrophe of the play; that 
Pippa and Pompilia and Phene are the same 
person in the same state of mind. In fact, 
the family likeness is great. They will say 
that the philosophic monologues are repeti- 
tions of each other. It cannot be denied 
that there is much repetition, — much thresh- 
ing out of old straw. Those who have read 
Browning for years and are used to the mon- 
ologues are better pleased to find the old 
ideas than new ones, which they could not 
understand so readily. When the later 
Browning takes us on one of those long 
afternoon rambles through his mind, — over 
moor and fen, through jungle, down preci- 
pice, past cataract, — we know just where we 
are coming out in the end. We know the 
place better than he did himself. Nor will 
posterity like Browning's manners, — the dig 
in the ribs, the personal application, and 
de te fabula of most of his talking. These 
unpleasant things are part of his success with 
199 



ROBERT BROWNING 

us to whom he means life, not art. Posterity 
will want only art. We needed doctrine. If 
he had not preached, we would not have lis- 
tened to him. But posterity evades the 
preachers and accepts only singers. Pos- 
terity is so dainty that it lives on nothing but 
choice morsels. It will cull such out of the 
body of Browning as the anthologists are 
beginning to do already, and will leave the 
great mass of him to be rediscovered from 
time to time by belated sufferers from the 
philosophy of the nineteenth century. 

There is a class of persons who claim for 
Browning that his verse is really good verse, 
and that he was a master of euphony. This 
cannot be admitted except as to particular 
instances in which his success is due to his 
conformity to law, not to his violation of it. 

The rules of verse in English are merely a 
body of custom which has grown up uncon- 
sciously, and most of which rests upon some 
simple requirement of the ear. 

In speaking of the power of poetry we are 
dealing with what is essentially a mystery, the 
outcome of infinitely subtle, numerous, and 
complex forces. 

The rhythm of versification seems to serve 
the purpose of a prompter. It lets us know in 

200 






ROBERT BROWNING 

advance just what syllables are to receive the 
emphasis which shall make the sense clear. 
There are many lines in poetry which become 
obscure the instant they are written in prose, 
and probably the advantages of poetry over 
prose, or, to express it modestly, the excuse 
for poetry at all, is that the form facilitates 
the comprehension of the matter. Rhyme is 
itself an indication that a turning-point has 
been reached. It punctuates and sets off the 
sense, and relieves our attention from the 
strain of suspended interest. All of the arti- 
fices of poetical form seem designed to a like 
end. Naturalness of speech is somewhat sacri- 
ficed, but we gain by the sacrifice a certain uni- 
formity of speech which rests and exhilarates. 
We need not, for the present, examine the 
question of euphony any further, nor ask 
whether euphony be not a positive element 
in verse, — an element which belongs to 
music. 

The negative advantages of poetry over 
prose are probably sufficient to account for 
most of its power. A few more considerations 
of the same negative nature, and which affect 
the vividness of either prose or verse, may be 
touched upon by way of preface to the inquiry, 
why Browning is hard to understand and why 
his verse is bad. 

201 



ROBERT BROWNING 

Every one is more at ease in his mind when 
he reads a language which observes the ordi- 
nary rules of grammar, proceeds by means of 
sentences having subjects and predicates, and 
of which the adjectives and adverbs fall easily 
into place. A doubt about the grammar is a 
doubt about the sense. And this is so true 
that sometimes when our fears are allayed 
by faultless grammar we may read absolute 
nonsense with satisfaction. We sometimes 

i hear it stated as a bitter epigram, that poetry 

is likely to endure just in proportion as the 

j form of it is superior to the content. As to 

the " inferiority " of the content, a moment's 
reflection shows that the ideas and feelings 
which prevail from age to age, and in which 
we may expect posterity to delight, are in 
their nature, and of necessity, commonplace. 
And if by " superiority of form " it is meant 
that these ideas shall be conveyed in flowing 
metres, — in words which are easy to pro- 
nounce, put together according to the rules 
of grammar, and largely drawn from the vul- 
gar tongue, — we need not wonder that pos- 
terity should enjoy it. In fact, it is just such 
verse as this which survives from age to age. 

Browning possesses one superlative excel- 
lence, and it is upon this that he relies. It is 
upon this that he has emerged and attacked 

202 



ROBERT BROWNING 

the heart of man. It is upon this that he 
may possibly fight his way down to posterity 
and live like a fire forever in the bosom of 
mankind. 

His language is the language of common 
speech ; his force, the immediate force of life. 
His language makes no compromises of any 
sort. It is not subdued to form. The em- 
phasis demanded by the sense is very often 
not the emphasis demanded by the metre. 
He cuts off his words and forces them ruth- 
lessly into lines as a giant might force his 
limbs into the armor of a mortal. The joints 
and members of the speech fall in the wrong 
places and have no relation to the joints and 
members of the metre. 

He writes like a lion devouring an antelope. 
He rends his subject, breaks its bones, and 
tears out the heart of it. He is not made 
more, but less, comprehensible by the verse- 
forms in which he writes. The sign-posts of 
the metre lead us astray. He would be easier 
to understand if his poems were printed in 
the form of prose. That is the reason why 
Browning becomes easy when read aloud; 
for in reading aloud we give the emphasis of 
speech, and throw over all effort to follow the 
emphasis of the metre. This is also the reason 
why Browning is so unquotable — why he has 
203 









ROBERT BROWNING 

made so little effect upon the language — why 
so few of the phrases and turns of thought 
and metaphor with which poets enrich a lan- 
guage have been thrown into English by him. 
Let a man who does not read poetry take up 
a volume of Familiar Quotations, and he will 
find page after page of lines and phrases 
which he knows by heart — from Tennyson, 
Milton, Wordsworth — things made familiar 
to him not by the poets, but by the men 
whom the poets educated, and who adopted 
their speech. Of Browning he will know not 
a word. And yet Browning's poetry is full of 
words that glow and smite, and which have 
been burnt into and struck into the most influ- 
ential minds of the last fifty years. 

But Browning's phrases are almost impos- 
sible to remember, because they are speech 
not reduced to poetry. They do not sing, 
they do not carry. They have no artificial 
buoys to float them in our memories. 

It follows from this uncompromising nature 
of Browning that when, by the grace of inspi- 
ration, the accents of his speech do fall into 
rhythm, his words will have unimaginable 
sweetness. The music is so much a part of the 
words — so truly spontaneous — that other 
verse seems tame and manufactured beside his. 

Rhyme is generally so used by Browning 
204 



ROBERT BROWNING 

as not to subserve the true function of rhyme. 
It is forced into a sort of superficial confor- 
mity, but marks no epoch in the verse. The 
clusters of rhymes are clusters only to the eye 
and not to the ear. The necessity of rhyming 
leads Browning into inversions, — into expan- 
sions of sentences beyond the natural close of 
the form, — into every sort of contortion. 
The rhymes clog and distress the sentences. 

As to grammar, Browning is negligent. 
Some of his most eloquent and wonderful pas- 
sages have no grammar whatever. In Sor- 
dello grammar does not exist ; and the want 
of it, the strain upon the mind caused by 
an effort to make coherent sentences out of a 
fleeting, ever-changing, iridescent maze of 
talk, wearies and exasperates the reader. Of 
course no one but a school-master desires 
that poetry shall be capable of being parsed ; 
but every one has a right to expect that he 
shall be left without a sense of grammatical 
deficiency. 

The Invocation in The Ring and the 
Book is one of the most beautiful openings 
that can be imagined. 

" O lyric love, half angel and half bird, 
And all a wonder and a wild desire — 
Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun, 
Took sanctuary within the holier blue, 
205 






ROBERT BROWNING 

And sang a kindred soul out to his face — 

Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart — 

When the first summons from the darkling earth 

Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue, 

And bared them of the glory — to drop down, 

To toil for man, to suffer or to die — 

This is the same voice : can thy soul know change ? 

Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help ! 

Never may I commence my song, my due 

To God who best taught song by gift of thee, 

Except with bent head and beseeching hand — 

That still, despite the distance and the dark 

What was, again may be ; some interchange 

Of grace, some splendor once thy very thought, 

Some benediction anciently thy smile ; — 

Never conclude, but raising hand and head 

Thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn 

For all hope, all sustainment, all reward, 

Their utmost up and on — so blessing back 

In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home, 

Some whiteness, which, I judge, thy face makes 

proud, 
Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall." 

These sublime lines are marred by appar- 
ent grammatical obscurity. The face of 
beauty is marred when one of the eyes seems 
sightless. We re-read the lines to see if we 
are mistaken. If they were in a foreign 
language, we should say we did not fully 
understand them. 

In the dramatic monologues, as, for in- 
stance, in The Ring and the Book and in the 
206 



ROBERT BROWNING 

innumerable other narratives and contempla- 
tions where a single speaker holds forth, we 
are especially called upon to forget grammar. 
The speaker relates and reflects, — pours out 
his ideas in the order in which they occur to 
him, — pursues two or three trains of thought 
at the same time, claims every license which 
either poetry or conversation could accord 
him. The effect of this method is so start- 
ling, that when we are vigorous enough to 
follow the sense, we forgive all faults of metre 
and grammar, and feel that this natural Niag- 
ara of speech is the only way for the turbulent 
mind of man to get complete utterance. We 
forget that it is possible for the same thing to 
be done, and yet to be subdued, and stilled, 
and charmed into music. 

Prospero is as natural and as individual as 
Bishop Blougram. His grammar is as incom- 
plete, yet we do not note it. He talks to 
himself, to Miranda, to Ariel, all at once, 
weaving all together his passions, his philoso- 
phy, his narrative, and his commands. His 
reflections are as profuse and as metaphysical 
as anything in Browning, and yet all is clear, 
— all is so managed that it lends magic. The 
characteristic and unfathomable significance 
of this particular character Prospero comes 
out of it. 

207 

M . 



ROBERT BROWNING 

" Prospero. My brother and thy uncle, called 
Antonio — 
I pray thee mark me, — that a brother should 
Be so perfidious ! — he whom next thyself, 
Of all the world I lov'd, and to him put 
The manage of my state ; as at that time 
Through all the seignories it was the first, 
And Prospero, the Prime Duke, being so reputed 
In dignity and for the liberal arts, 
Without a parallel : those being all my study, 
The government I cast upon my brother, 
And to my state grew stranger, being transported 
And wrapped in secret studies. Thy false uncle — 
Dost thou attend me ? " 

It is unnecessary to give examples from 
Browning of defective verse, of passages 
which cannot be understood, which cannot 
be construed, which cannot be parodied, and 
which can scarcely be pronounced. They 
are mentioned only as throwing light on 
Browning's cast of mind and methods of 
work. His inability to recast and correct his 
work cost the world a master. He seems to 
have been condemned to create at white heat 
and to stand before the astonishing draft, 
which his energy had flung out, powerless to 
complete it. 

We have a few examples of things which 

came forth perfect, but many of even the 

most beautiful and most original of the shorter 

poems are marred by some blotches that hurt 

208 



ROBERT BROWNING 

us and which one feels might have been struck 
out or corrected in half an hour. How many 
of the poems are too long ! It is not that 
Browning went on writing after he had com- 
pleted his thought, — for the burst of beauty 
is as likely to come at the end as at the 
beginning, — but that his thought had to 
unwind itself like web from a spider. He 
could not command it. He could only un- 
wind and unwind. 

Pan and Luna is a sketch, as luminous 
as a Correggio, but not finished. Caliban 
upon Setebos, on the other hand, shows crea- 
tive genius, beyond all modern reach, but 
flounders and drags on too long. In the 
poems which he revised, as, for instance, Herve 
Riel, which exists in two or more forms, the 
corrections are verbal, and were evidently 
done with the same fierce haste with which 
the poems were written. 

We must not for an instant imagine that 
Browning was indolent or indifferent; it is 
known that he was a taskmaster to himself. 
But he could not write other than he did. 
When the music came and the verse caught 
the flame, and his words became sweeter, and 
his thought clearer, then he could sweep 
down like an archangel bringing new strains 
of beauty to the earth. But the occasions 
14 209 



ROBERT BROWNING 

when he did this are a handful of passages in 
a body of writing as large as the Bible. 

Just as Browning could not stop, so he 
found it hard to begin. His way of beginning 
is to seize the end of the thread just where he 
can, and write down the first sentence. 

" She should never have looked at me, 
If she meant I should not love her ! " 

" Water your damned flowerpots, do — " 

" No ! for I '11 save it ! Seven years since." 

" But give them me, the mouth, the eyes, the brow ! " 

" Fear Death ? to feel the fog in my throat." 

Sometimes his verse fell into coils as it 
came, but he himself, as he wrote the first 
line of a poem, never knew in what form of 
verse the poem would come forth. Hence 
the novel figures and strange counterpoint. 
Having evolved the first group of lines at 
haphazard, he will sometimes repeat the form 
(a very complex form, perhaps, which, in 
order to have any organic effect, would have 
to be tuned to the ear most nicely), and 
repeat it clumsily. Individual taste must be 
judge of his success in these experiments. 
Sometimes the ear is worried by an attempt 
to trace the logic of the rhymes which are 
210 



ROBERT BROWNING 

concealed by the rough jolting of the metre. 
Sometimes he makes no attempt to repeat the 
first verse, but continues in irregular improvi- 
sation. 

Browning never really stoops to literature ; 
he makes perfunctory obeisance to it. The 
truth is that Browning is expressed by his 
defects. He would not be Robert Browning 
without them. In the technical part of his 
art, as well as in his spirit, Browning repre- 
sents a reaction of a violent sort. He was 
too great an artist not to feel that his viola- 
tions of form helped him. The blemishes in 
The Grammarian's Funeral — hotis busi- 
ness, the enclitic de — were stimulants; they 
heightened his effects. They helped him 
make clear his meaning, that life is greater 
than art. These savageries spoke to the 
hearts of men tired of smoothness and plati- 
tude, and who were relieved by just such a 
breaking up of the ice. Men loved Browning 
not only for what he was, but also for what he 
was not. 

These blemishes were, under the circum- 
stances, and for a limited audience, strokes of 
art. It is not to be pretended that, even from 
this point of view, they were always success- 
ful, only that they are organic. The nine- 
teenth century would have to be lived over 
211 






ROBERT BROWNING 

again to wipe these passages out of Browning's 
poetry. 

In that century he stands as one of the 
great men of England. His doctrines are 
the mere effulgence of his personality. He 
himself was the truth which he taught. His 
life was the life of one of his own heroes ; and 
in the close of his life — by a coincidence 
which is not sad, but full of meaning — may 
be seen one of those apparent paradoxes in 
which he himself delighted. 

Through youth and manhood Browning rose 
like a planet calmly following the laws of his 
own being. From time to time he put forth 
his volumes which the world did not under- 
stand. Neglect caused him to suffer, but not 
to change. It was not until his work was all 
but finished, not till after the publication of 
The Ring and the Book, that complete rec- 
ognition came to him. It was given him by 
men and women who had been in the nursery 
when he began writing, who had passed their 
youth with his minor poems, and who under- 
stood him. 

In later life Browning's powers declined. 
The torrent of feeling could no longer float 
the raft of doctrine, as it had done so lightly 
and for so long. His poems, always difficult, 
grew dry as well. 

212 



i 






ROBERT BROWNING 

But Browning was true to himself. He had 
all his life loved converse with men and 
women, and still enjoyed it. He wrote con- 
stantly and to his uttermost. It was not for 
him to know that his work was done. He 
wrote on manfully to the end, showing, 
occasionally, his old power, and always his 
old spirit. And on his death-bed it was not 
only his doctrine, but his life that blazed out 
in the words : — 

" One who never turned his back, but marched breast 
forward, 
Never doubted clouds would break, 
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong 

would triumph. 
Held, we fall to rise — are baffled to fight better — 
Sleep to wake." 



213 



,w4 



L 






ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 



1 






i 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 



In the early eighties, and in an epoch when 
the ideals of George Eliot were still control- 
ling, the figure of Stevenson rose with a sort 
of radiance as a writer whose sole object was 
to entertain. Most of the great novelists 
were then dead, and the scientific school was 
in the ascendant. Fiction was entering upon 
its death grapple with sociology. Stevenson 
came, with his tales of adventure and intrigue, 
out-of-door life and old-time romance, and he 
recalled to every reader his boyhood and the 
delights of his earliest reading. We had for- 
gotten that novels could be amusing. 

Hence it is that the great public not only 
loves Stevenson as a writer, but regards him 
with a certain personal gratitude. There was, 
moreover, in everything he wrote an engaging 
humorous touch which made friends for him 
everywhere, and excited an interest in his 
fragile and somewhat elusive personality sup- 
plementary to the appreciation of his books 
as literature. Toward the end of his life 
217 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 







both he and the public discovered this, and 
his railleries or sermons took on the form 
of personal talk. 

Beneath these matters lay the fact, known 
to all, that the man was fighting a losing 
battle against mortal sickness, and that 
practically the whole of his work was done 
under conditions which made any produc- 
tivity seem a miracle. The heroic invalid 
was seen through all his books, still sitting 
before his desk or on his bed, turning out 
with unabated courage, with increasing ability, 
volume after volume of gayety, of boys' story- 
book, and of tragic romance. 

There is enough in this record to explain 
the popularity, running at times into hero- 
worship and at times into drawing-room 
fatuity, which makes Stevenson and his work 
a fair subject for study. It is not impossible 
that a man who met certain needs of the 
times so fully, and whom large classes of 
people sprang forward to welcome, may in 
some particulars give a clew to the age. 

Any description of Stevenson's books is 
unnecessary. We have all read them too 
recently to need a prompter. The high 
spirits and elfin humor which play about 
and support every work justifies them all. 
One of his books, The Child's Garden of 
218 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

Verses, is different in kind from the rest It 
has no prototype, and is by far the most 
original thing that he did. The unsophisti- 
cated and gay little volume is a work of the 
greatest value. Stevenson seems to have 
remembered the impressions of his childhood 
with accuracy, and he has recorded them 
without affectation, without sentimentality, 
without exaggeration. In depicting children 
he draws from life. He is at home in the 
mysteries of their play and in the inconse- 
quent operations of their minds, in the golden 
haze of impressions in which they live. The 
references to children in his essays and books 
show the same understanding and sympathy. 
There is more than mere literary charm in 
what he says here. In the matter of child- 
hood we must study him with respect. He 
is an authority. 

The slight but serious studies in biography 
— alas ! too few — which Stevenson published, 
ought also to be mentioned, because their 
merit is apt to be overlooked by the admirers 
of his more ambitious works. His under- 
standing of two such opposite types of men 
as Burns and Thoreau is notable, and no less 
notable are the courage, truth, and penetra- 
tion with which he dealt with them. His 
essay on Burns is the most comprehensible 
219 




ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 



word ever said of Burns. It makes us love 
Burns less, but understand him more. 

The problems suggested by Stevenson are 
more important than his work itself. We 
have in him that rare combination, — a man 
whose theories and whose practice are of a 
piece. His doctrines are the mere descrip- 
tion of his own state of mind while at 
work. 

The quality which every one will agree in 
conceding to Stevenson is lightness of touch. 
This quality is a result of his extreme lucidity, 
not only of thought, but of intention. We 
know what he means, and we are sure that we 
grasp his whole meaning at the first reading. 
Whether he be writing a tale of travel or 
humorous essay, a novel of adventure, a story 
of horror, a morality, or a fable ; in whatever 
key he plays, — and he seems to have taken 
delight in showing mastery in many, — the 
reader feels safe in his hands, and knows that 
no false note will be struck. His work makes 
no demands upon the attention. It is food so 
thoroughly peptonized that it is digested as 
soon as swallowed and leaves us exhilarated 
rather than fed. 

Writing was to him an art, and almost 
everything that he has written has a little 
the air of being a tour de force. Steven- 

220 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

son's books and essays were generally bril- 
liant imitations of established things, done 
somewhat in the spirit of an expert in bil- 
liards. In short, Stevenson is the most ex- 
traordinary mimic that has ever appeared in 
literature. 

That is the reason why he has been so 
much praised for his style. When we say of 
a new thing that it " has style," we mean that 
it is done as we have seen things done 
before. Bunyan, De Foe, or Charles Lamb 
were to their contemporaries men without 
style. The English, to this day, complain 
of Emerson that he has no style. 

If a man writes as he talks, he will be 
thought to have no style, until people get 
used to him, for literature means what has 
been written. As soon as a writer is estab- 
lished, his manner of writing is adopted by 
the literary conscience of the times, and you 
may follow him and still have " style." You 
may to-day imitate George Meredith, and 
people, without knowing exactly why they do 
it, will concede you " style." Style means 
tradition. 

When Stevenson, writing from Samoa in the 

agony of his South Seas (a book he could 

not write because he had no paradigm and 

original to copy from), says that he longs for 

221 



1 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

a " moment of style," he means that he 
wishes there would come floating through 
his head a memory of some other man's way 
of writing to which he could modulate his 
sentences. 

It is no secret that Stevenson in early life 
spent much time in imitating the styles of 
various authors, for he has himself described 
the manner in which he went to work to fit 
himself for his career as a writer. His boyish 
ambition led him to employ perfectly phenom- 
enal diligence in cultivating a perfectly phe- 
nomenal talent for imitation. 

There was probably no fault in Stevenson's 
theory as to how a man should learn to write, 
and as to the discipline he must undergo. 
Almost all the greatest artists have shown, 
in their early work, traces of their early 
masters. These they outgrow. " For as this 
temple waxes, the inward service of the mind 
and soul grows wide withal ; " and an author's 
own style breaks through the coverings of his 
education, as a hyacinth breaks from the 
bulb. It is noticeable, too, that the early and 
imitative work of great men generally belongs 
to a particular school to which their maturity 
bears a logical relation. They do not cruise 
about in search of a style or vehicle, trying 
all and picking up hints here and there, but 
222 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

they fall incidentally and genuinely under 
influences which move them and afterwards 
qualify their original work. 

With Stevenson it was different; for he 
went in search of a style as Ccelebs in search 
of a wife. He was an eclectic by nature. 
He became a remarkable, if not a unique phe- 
nomenon, — for he never grew up. Whether 
or not there was some obscure connection 
between his bodily troubles and the arrest of 
his intellectual development, it is certain that 
Stevenson remained a boy till the day of his 
death. 

The boy was the creature in the universe 
whom Stevenson best understood. Let us 
remember how a boy feels about art, and why 
he feels so. The intellect is developed in the 
child with such astonishing rapidity that long 
before physical maturity its head is filled 
with ten thousand things learned from books 
and not drawn directly from real life. 

The form and setting in which the boy 
learns of matters sticks in the mind as a part 
of the matters themselves. He cannot dis- 
entangle what is conventional from what is 
original, because he has not yet a first-hand 
acquaintance with life by which to interpret. 

Every schoolboy of talent writes essays 
in the style of Addison, because he is taught 
223 






ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 



that this is the correct way of writing. He 
has no means of knowing that in writing in 
this manner he is using his mind in a very 
peculiar and artificial way, — a way entirely 
foreign to Addison himself; and that he is 
really striving not so much to say something 
himself as to reproduce an effect. 

There is one thing which young people do 
not know, and which they find out during the 
process of growing up, — and that is that 
good things in art have been done by men 
whose entire attention was absorbed in an 
attempt to tell the truth, and who have 
been chiefly marked by a deep unconscious- 
ness. 

To a boy, the great artists of the world are 
a lot of necromancers, whose enchantments 
can perhaps be stolen and used again. To a 
man, they are a lot of human beings, and their 
works are parts of them. Their works are 
their hands and their feet, their organs, di- 
mensions, senses, affections, passions. To a 
man, it is as absurd to imitate the manner of 
Dean Swift in writing as it would be to imi- 
tate the manner of Dr. Johnson in eating. 
But Stevenson was not a man, he was a 
boy ; or, to speak more accurately, the atti- 
tude of his mind towards his work remained 
unaltered from boyhood till death, though 
224 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

his practice and experiment gave him, as he 
grew older, a greater mastery over his mate- 
rials. It is in this attitude of Stevenson's 
mind toward his own work that we must 
search for the heart of his mystery. 

He conceived of himself as " an artist," 
and of his writings as performances. As a 
consequence, there is an undertone of insin- 
cerity in almost everything which he has 
written. His attention is never wholly ab- 
sorbed in his work, but is greatly taken up 
with the notion of how each stroke of it is 
going to appear. 

We have all experienced, while reading his 
books, a certain undefinable suspicion which 
interferes with the enjoyment of some people, 
and enhances that of others. It is not so 
much the cream-tarts themselves that we sus- 
pect, as the motive of the giver. 

" I am in the habit," said Prince Florizel, 
" of looking not so much to the nature of the 
gift as to the spirit in which it is offered." 

" The spirit, sir," returned the young man, 
with another bow, " is one of mockery." 

This doubt about Stevenson's truth and 
candor is one of the results of the artistic 
doctrines which he professed and practised. 
He himself regards his work as a toy; and 
how can we do otherwise? 
is 225 



n 



1 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

It seems to be a law of psychology that the 
only way in which the truth can be strongly 
told is in the course of a search for truth. 
The moment a man strives after some " ef- 
fect," he disqualifies himself from making 
that effect; for he draws the interest of his 
audience to the same matters that occupy his 
own mind ; namely, upon his experiment and 
his efforts. It is only when a man is say- 
ing something that he believes is obviously 
and eternally true, that he can communicate 
spiritual things. 

Ultimately speaking, the vice of Steven- 
son's theories about art is that they call for a 
self-surrender by the artist of his own mind 
to the pleasure of others, for a subordination 
of himself to the production of this " effect " 
in the mind of another. They degrade and 
belittle him. Let Stevenson speak for him- 
self; the thought contained in the follow- 
ing passage is found in a hundred places 
in his writings and dominated his artistic 
life. 

" The French have a romantic evasion for 
one employment, and call its practitioners the 
Daughters of Joy. The artist is of the same 
family, he is of the Sons of Joy, chose his 
trade to please himself, gains his livelihood 
by pleasing others, and has parted with 
226 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

something of the sterner dignity of men. 
The poor Daughter of Joy carrying her 
smiles and her finery quite unregarded 
through the crowd, makes a figure which it 
is impossible to recall without a wounding 
pity. She is the type of the unsuccessful 
artist." 

These are the doctrines and beliefs which, 
time out of mind, have brought the arts into 
contempt. They are as injurious as they are 
false, and they will checkmate the progress 
of any man or of any people that believes 
them. They corrupt and menace not merely 
the fine arts, but every other form of human 
expression in an equal degree. They are as 
insulting to the comic actor as they are to 
Michael Angelo, for the truth and beauty of 
low comedy are as dignified, and require of 
the artist the same primary passion for life 
for its own sake, as the truth and beauty of 
The Divine Comedy. The doctrines are the 
outcome of an Alexandrine age. After art 
has once learnt to draw its inspiration directly 
from life and has produced some master- 
pieces, then imitations begin to creep in. 
That Stevenson's doctrines tend to produce 
imitative work is obvious. If the artist is a 
fisher of men, then we must examine the 
works of those who have known how to bait 
227 



. 



/I 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 






their hooks : in fiction, — De Foe, Fielding, 
Walter Scott, Dumas, Balzac. 

To a study of these men, Stevenson had, 
as we have seen, devoted the most plastic 
years of his life. The style and even the 
mannerisms of each of them, he had trained 
himself to reproduce. One can almost write 
their names across his pages and assign each 
as a presiding genius over a share of his 
work. Not that Stevenson purloined or 
adopted in a mean spirit, and out of vanity. 
His enthusiasm was at the bottom of all he 
did. He was well read in the belles lettres 
of England and the romanticists of France. 
These books were his bible. He was steeped 
in the stage-land and cloud-land of senti- 
mental literature. From time to time, he 
emerged, trailing clouds of glory and shower- 
ing sparkles from his hands. 

A close inspection shows his clouds and 
sparkles to be stage properties ; but Steven- 
son did not know it. The public not only 
does not know it, but does not care whether 
it be so or not. The doughty old novel 
readers who knew their Scott and Ainsworth 
and Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade, their 
Dumas and their Cooper, were the very 
people whose hearts were warmed by Stev- 
enson. If you cross-question one of these, 
228 



' 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

he will admit that Stevenson is after all a 
revival, an echo, an after-glow of the roman- 
tic movement, and that he brought nothing 
new. He will scout any comparison between 
Stevenson and his old favorites, but he is 
ready enough to take Stevenson for what he 
is worth. The most casual reader recognizes 
a whole department of Stevenson's work as 
competing in a general way with Walter 
Scott. 

Kidnapped is a romantic fragment whose 
original is to be found in the Scotch scenes 
of the Waverley Novels. An incident near 
the beginning of it, the curse of Jennet 
Clouston upon the House of Shaws, is trans- 
ferred from Guy Mannering almost literally. 
But the curse of Meg Merrilies in Guy Man- 
nering — which is one of the most surprising 
and powerful scenes Scott ever wrote — is an 
organic part of the story, whereas the tran- 
script is a thing stuck in for effect, and the 
curse is put in the mouth of an old woman 
whose connection with the plot is apocryphal, 
and who never appears again. 

Treasure Island is a piece of astounding 
ingenuity, in which the manner is taken from 
Robinson Crusoe, and the plot belongs to 
the era of the detective story. The Treas- 
ure of Franchard is a French farce or light 
229 






ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

comedy of bourgeois life, of a type already a 
little old-fashioned, but perfectly authentic. 
The tone, the mise-en-schie> the wit, the char- 
acter-drawing, the very language, are all so 
marvellously reproduced from the French, 
that we almost see the footlights while we 
read it. 

The Sieur de Maletroit's Door embodies 
the same idea as a well-known French play 
in verse and in one act. The version of 
Stevenson is like an exquisite water-color 
copy, almost as good as the original. 

The Isle of Voices is the production of a 
man of genius. No one can too much admire 
the legerdemain of the magician who could 
produce this thing ; for it is a story out of 
the Arabian Nights, told with a perfection of 
mannerism, a reproduction of the English in 
which the later translators of the Arabian 
Nights have seen fit to deal, a simulation of 
the movement and detail of the Eastern stories 
which fairly takes our breath away. 

It is " ask and have " with this man. Like 
Mephistopheles in the Raths-Keller, he gives 
us what vintage we call for. Olalla is an 
instance in point. Any one familiar with 
MerimeVs stories will smile at the na'fvete 
with which Stevenson has taken the lead- 
ing idea of Lokis, and surrounded it with 
230 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

the Spanish sunshine of Carmen. But we 
have " fables," moralities, and psychology, 
Jekyl and Hyde, Markheim, and Will O' the 
Mill. We have the pasteboard feudal style, 
in which people say, " Ye can go, boy; for I 
will keep your good friend and my good gossip 
company till curfew — aye, and by St. Mary till 
the Sun get up again." We must have opera 
bouffe, as in Prince Otto ; melodrama, as in 
The Pavilion on the Links; the essay of 
almost biblical solemnity in the manner of 
Sir Thomas Browne, the essay of charming 
humor in the style of Charles Lamb, the 
essay of introspection and egotism in the 
style of Montaigne. 

Let us not for a moment imagine that 
Stevenson has stolen these things and is try- 
ing to palm them off on us as his own. He 
has absorbed them. He does not know their 
origin. He gives them out again in joy and 
in good faith with zest and amusement and 
in the excitement of a new discovery. 

If all these many echoing voices do not 
always ring accurately true, yet their number 
is inordinate and remarkable. They will not 
bear an immediate comparison with their 
originals ; but we may be sure that the vin- 
tages of Mephistopheles would not have stood 
a comparison with real wine. 
231 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 



One of the books which established Steven- 
son's fame was the New Arabian Nights. 
The series of tales about Prince Florizel of 
Bohemia was a brilliant, original, and alto- 
gether delightful departure in light literature. 
The stories are a frank and wholesome cari- 
cature of the French detective story. They 
are legitimate pieces of literature because 
they are burlesque, and because the smiling 
Mephistopheles who lurks everywhere in the 
pages of Stevenson is for this time the 
acknowledged showman of the piece. 

A burlesque is always an imitation shown 
off by the foil of some incongruous setting. 
The setting in this case Stevenson found 
about him in the omnibuses, the clubs, and the 
railways of sordid and complicated London. 

In this early book Stevenson seems to have 
stumbled upon the true employment of his 
powers without realizing the treasure trove, 
for he hardly returned to the field of humor, 
for which his gifts most happily fitted him. 
As a writer of burlesque he truly expresses 
himself. He is full of genuine fun. 

The fantastic is half brother to the bur- 
lesque. Each implies some original as a point 
of departure, and as a scheme for treatment 
some framework upon which the author's wit 
and fancy shall be lavished. 
232 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

It is in the region of the fantastic that 
Stevenson loved to wander, and it is in this 
direction that he expended his marvellous 
ingenuity. His fairy tales and arabesques 
must be read as they were written, in the 
humor of forty fancies and without any heavy- 
fisted intention of getting new ideas about 
life. It will be said that the defect of Steven- 
son is expressed by these very qualities, fancy 
and ingenuity, because they are contradictory, 
and the second destroys the first. Be this as 
it may, there are many people whose pleasure 
is not spoiled by elaboration and filigree 
work. 

Our ability to follow Stevenson in his fan- 
tasias depends very largely upon how far our 
imaginations and our sentimental interests are 
dissociated from our interest in real life. 
Commonplace and common-sense people, 
whose emotional natures are not strongly at 
play in the conduct of their daily lives, have 
a fund of unexpended mental activity, of a 
very low degree of energy, which delights to 
be occupied with the unreal and the impos- 
sible. More than this, any mind which is 
daily occupied in an attempt to grasp some 
of the true relations governing things as they 
are, finds its natural relaxation in the contem- 
plation of things as they are not, — things as 
2 33 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

they cannot be. There is probably no one 
who will not find himself thoroughly enjoy- 
ing the fantastic, if he be mentally fatigued 
enough. Hence the justification of a whole 
branch of Stevenson's work. 

After every detraction has been allowed for, 
there remain certain books of Stevenson's of 
an extraordinary and peculiar merit, books 
which can hardly be classed as imitations or 
arabesques, — Kidnapped, Weir of Hermis- 
ton, The Merry Men. These books seem 
at first blush to have every element of great- 
ness, except spontaneity. The only trouble 
is, they are too perfect. 

If, after finishing Kidnapped, or The 
Merry Men, we take up Guy Mannering, 
or The Antiquary, or any of Scott's books 
which treat of the peasantry, the first im- 
pression we gain is, that we are happy. 
The tension is gone ; we are in contact with 
a great, sunny, benign human being who 
pours a flood of life out before us and floats 
us as the sea floats a chip. He is full of old- 
fashioned and absurd passages. Sometimes 
he proses, and sometimes he runs to seed. 
He is so careless of his English that his sen- 
tences are not always grammatical; but we 
get a total impression of glorious and whole- 
some life. 

234 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

It is the man Walter Scott who thus ex- 
cites us. This heather, these hills, these 
peasants, this prodigality and vigor and 
broad humor, enlarge and strengthen us. If 
we return now to Weir of Hermiston, we 
seem to be entering the cell of an alchemist 
All is intention, all calculation. The very- 
style of Weir of Hermiston is English ten 
times distilled. 

Let us imagine that directness and uncon- 
sciousness are the great qualities of style, 
and that Stevenson believes this. The great- 
est directness and unconsciousness of which 
Stevenson himself was capable are to be 
found in some of his early writings. Across 
the Plains, for instance, represents his most 
straightforward and natural style. But it 
happens that certain great writers who 
lived some time ago, and were famous exam- 
ples of "directness," have expressed them- 
selves in the speech of their own period. 
Stevenson rejects his own style as not good 
enough for him, not direct enough, not un- 
conscious enough ; he will have theirs. And 
so he goes out in quest of purity and truth, 
and brings home an elaborate archaism. 

Although we think of Stevenson as a 
writer of fiction, his extreme popularity is 
due in great measure to his innumerable 
2 35 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 



essays and bits of biography and autobiog- 
raphy, his letters, his journals, and travels and 
miscellaneous reminiscences. 

It was his own belief that he was a very 
painstaking and conscientious artist, and this 
is true to a great extent. On the day of his 
death he was engaged upon the most highly 
organized and ambitious thing he ever at- 
tempted, and every line of it shows the hand 
of an engraver on steel. But it is also true 
that during the last years of his life he lived 
under the pressure of photographers and 
newspaper syndicates, who came to him with 
great sums of money in their hands. He was 
exploited by the press of the United States, 
and this is the severest ordeal which a writer 
of English can pass through. There was one 
year in which he earned four thousand pounds. 
His immeasurable generosity kept him forever 
under the harrow in money matters, and added 
another burden to the weight carried by this 
dying and indomitable man. It is no wonder 
that some of his work is trivial. The wonder 
is that he should have produced it at all. 

The journalistic work of Stevenson, begin- 
ning with his Inland Voyage, and the letters 
afterwards published as Across the Plains, is 
valuable in the inverse ratio to its embellish- 
ment. Sidney Colvin suggested to him that 
236 








ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

in the letters Across the Plains the lights 
were turned down. But, in truth, the light 
is daylight. The letters have a freshness that 
midnight oil could not have improved, and 
this fugitive sketch is of more permanent in- 
terest than all the polite essays he ever 
wrote. 

If we compare the earlier with the later 
work of Stevenson as a magazine writer, we 
are struck with the accentuation of his man- 
nerisms. It is not a single style which grows 
more intense, but his amazing skill in many 
which has increased. 

The following is a specimen of Stevenson's 
natural style, and it would be hard to find a 
better : — 

" The day faded ; the lamps were lit ; a 
party of wild young men, who got off next 
evening at North Platte, stood together on 
the stern platform singing The Sweet By- 
. and- By with very tuneful voices; the chums 
began to put up their beds; and it seemed 
as if the business of the day were at an end. 
But it was not so ; for the train stopping at 
some station, the cars were instantly thronged 
with the natives, wives and fathers, young 
men and maidens, some of them in little 
more than night-gear, some with stable lan- 
terns, and all offering beds for sale." 
237 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 




The following is from an essay written by- 
Stevenson while under the influence of the 
author of Rab and his Friends. 

" One such face I now remember ; one 
such blank some half a dozen of us labor to 
dissemble. In his youth he was a most beau- 
tiful person, most serene and genial by dispo- 
sition, full of racy words and quaint thoughts. 
Laughter attended on his coming. . . . 
From this disaster like a spent swimmer he 
came desperately ashore, bankrupt of money 
and consideration ; creeping to the family he 
had deserted ; with broken wing never more 
to rise. But in his face there was the light 
of knowledge that was new to it. Of the 
wounds of his body he was never healed; 
died of them gradually, with clear-eyed resig- 
nation. Of his wounded pride we knew only 
by his silence." 

The following is in the sprightly style of 
the eighteenth century : — 

" Cockshot is a different article, but vastly 
entertaining, and has been meat and drink to 
me for many a long evening. His manner is 
dry, brisk, and pertinacious, and the choice 
of words not much. The point about him is 
his extraordinary readiness and spirit. You 
can propound nothing but he has either a 
theory about it ready made or will have one 
238 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

instantly on the stocks, and proceed to lay 
its timbers and launch it on the minute. 
* Let me see/ he will say, ' give me a mo- 
ment, I should have some theory for that.' " 

But for serious matters this manner would 
never do, and accordingly we find that, when 
the subject invites him, Stevenson falls into 
English as early as the time of James I. 

Let us imagine Bacon dedicating one of his 
smaller works to his physicians : — 

"There are men and classes of men that 
stand above the common herd : the soldier, the 
sailor, and the shepherd not unfrequently ; 
the artist rarely ; rarelier still the clergyman ; 
the physician almost as a rule. ... I forget 
as many as I remember and I ask both to 
pardon me, these for silence, those for inade- 
quate speech." 

After finishing off this dedication to his 
satisfaction, Stevenson turns over the page 
and writes a NOTE in the language of two 
and one-half centuries later. He is now the 
elegant litterateur of the last generation — , 
one would say James Russell Lowell : — 

" The human conscience has fled of late 
the troublesome domain of conduct for what 
I should have supposed to be the less con- 
genial field of art: there she may now be 
said to rage, and with special severity in all 
239 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

that touches dialect, so that in every novel 
the letters of the alphabet are tortured, and 
\ the reader wearied, to commemorate shades 

of mispronunciation." 

But in this last extract we are still three 
degrees away from what can be done in the 
line of gentility and delicate effeteness of 
style. Take the following, which is the very 
peach-blow of courtesy : — 
\ " But upon one point there should be no 

dubiety: if a man be not frugal he has no 
business in the arts. If he be not frugal he 
steers directly for that last tragic scene of 
le vieux saltimbanque ; if he be not frugal he 
will find it hard to continue to be honest. 
Some day when the butcher is knocking at 
the door he may be tempted, he may be 
obliged to turn out and sell a slovenly piece 
of work. If the obligation shall have arisen 
through no wantonness of his own, he is even 
to be commended, for words cannot describe 
how far more necessary it is that a man 
should support his family than that he should 
attain to — or preserve — distinction in the 
arts," etc. 

Now the very next essay to this is a sort 
of intoned voluntary played upon the more 
sombre emotions. 

"What a monstrous spectre is this man, 
240 



1 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting 
alternate feet or lying drugged in slumber; 
killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small 
copies of himself; grown upon with hair like 
grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter 
in his face ; a thing to set children scream- 
ing; — and yet looked at nearlier, known as 
his fellows know him, how surprising are his 
attributes." 

There is a tincture of Carlyle in this mix- 
ture. There are a good many pages of Gothic 
type in the later essays, for Stevenson thought 
it the proper tone in which to speak of death, 
duty, immortality, and such subjects as that. 
He derived this impression from the works 
of Sir Thomas Browne. But the solemnity 
of Sir Thomas Browne is like a melodious 
thunder, deep, sweet, unconscious, ravishing. 

" Time sadly overcometh all things and is 
now dominant and sitteth upon a sphinx and 
looketh upon Memphis and old Thebes, while 
his sister Oblivion reclineth semi-somnous 
upon a pyramid, gloriously triumphing, mak- 
ing puzzles of Titanian erections, and turning 
old glories into dreams. History sinketh 
beneath her cloud. The traveller as he 
passeth through these deserts asketh of her 
'who builded them?' And she mumbleth 
something, but what it is he heareth not." 
16 241 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 









The frenzy to produce something like this 
sadly overcomes Stevenson, in his later es- 
says. But perhaps it were to reason too 
curiously to pin Stevenson down to Browne. 
All the old masters stalk like spectres through 
his pages, and among them are the shades of 
the moderns, even men that we have dined 
with. 

According to Stevenson, a certain kind of 
subject requires a certain " treatment," and 
the choice of his tone follows his title. These 
" treatments " are always traditional, and even 
his titles tread closely on the heels of former 
titles. He can write the style of Charles 
Lamb better than Lamb could do it himself, 
and his Hazlitt is very nearly as good. He 
fences with his left hand as well as with his 
right, and can manage two styles at once like 
Franz Liszt playing the allegretto from the 
7th symphony with an air of Offenbach twined 
about it. 

It is with a pang of disappointment that we 
now and then come across a style which we 
recognize, yet cannot place. 

People who take enjoyment in the reminis- 
cences awakened by conjuring of this kind 
can nowhere in the world find a master like 
Stevenson. Those persons belong to the 
bookish classes. Their numbers are insigni- 
242 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

ficant, but they are important because they 
give countenance to the admiration of others 
who love Stevenson with their hearts and 
souls. 

The reason why Stevenson represents a 
backward movement in literature, is that 
literature lives by the pouring into it of new 
words from speech, and new thoughts from 
life, and Stevenson used all his powers to 
exclude both from his work. He lived and 
wrote in the past. That this Scotchman 
should appear at the end of what has been 
a very great period of English literature, and 
summarize the whole of it in his two hours' 
traffic on the stage, gives him a strange place 
in the history of that literature. He is the 
Improvisatore, and nothing more. It is im- 
possible to assign him rank in any line of 
writing. If you shut your eyes to try and 
place him, you find that you cannot do it. 
The effect he produces while we are reading 
him vanishes as we lay down the book, and 
we can recall nothing but a succession of 
flavors. It is not to be expected that pos- 
terity will take much interest in him, for his 
point and meaning are impressional. He is 
ephemeral, a shadow, a reflection. He is the 
mistletoe of English literature whose roots 
are not in the soil but in the tree. 
243 






ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

But enough of the nature and training of 
Stevenson which fitted him to play the part 
he did. The cyclonic force which turned him 
from a secondary London novelist into some- 
thing of importance and enabled him to give 
full play to his really unprecedented talents 
will be recognized on glancing about us. 

We are now passing through the age of 
the Distribution of Knowledge. The spread 
of the English-speaking race since 1850, and 
the cheapness of printing, have brought in 
primers and handbooks by the million. All 
the books of the older literatures are being 
abstracted and sown abroad in popular edi- 
tions. The magazines fulfil the same func- 
tion ; every one of them is a penny cyclopedia. 
Andrew Lang heads an army of organized 
workers who mine in the old literature and 
coin it into booklets and cash. 

The American market rules the supply of 
light literature in Great Britain. While Lang 
culls us tales and legends and lyrics from the 
Norse or Provencal, Stevenson will engage to 
supply us with tales and legends of his own — 
something just as good. The two men serve 
the same public. 

Stevenson's reputation in England was that 
of a comparatively light weight, but his suc- 
cess here was immediate. We hailed him 
244 









ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

as a classic — or something just as good. 
Everything he did had the very stamp and 
trademark of Letters, and he was as strong 
in one department as another. We loved 
this man; and thenceforward he purveyed 
" literature " to us at a rate to feed sixty 
millions of people and keep them clamoring 
for more. 

Does any one believe that the passion of 
the American people for learning and for 
antiquity is a slight and accidental thing? 
Does any one believe that the taste for imita- 
tion old furniture is a pose? It creates an 
eddy in the Maelstrom of Commerce. It is 
a power like Niagara, and represents the sin- 
cere appreciation of half educated people for 
second rate things. There is here nothing 
to be ashamed of. In fact there is every- 
thing to be proud of in this progress of the 
arts, this importation of culture by the carload. 
The state of mind it shows is a definite and 
typical state of mind which each individual 
passes through, and which precedes the dis- 
covery that real things are better than sham. 
When the latest Palace Hotel orders a hun- 
dred thousand dollars' worth of Louis XV. 
furniture to be made — and most well made 
— in Buffalo, and when the American public 
gives Stevenson an order for Pulvis et Umbra 
245 









ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 



— the same forces are at work in each case. 
It is Chicago making culture hum. 

And what kind of a man was Stevenson? 
Whatever may be said about his imitative- 
ness, his good spirits were real. They are at 
the bottom of his success, the strong note in his 
work. They account for all that is paradoxi- 
cal in his effect. He often displays a senti- 
mentalism which has not the ring of reality. 
And yet we do not reproach him. He has 
by stating his artistic doctrines in their frankest 
form revealed the scepticism inherent in 
them. And yet we know that he was not a 
sceptic ; on the contrary, we like him, and he 
was regarded by his friends as little lower 
than the angels. 

Why is it that we refuse to judge him by 
his own utterances? The reason is that all 
of his writing is playful, and we know it. 
The instinct at the bottom of all mimicry 
is self-concealment. Hence the illusive and 
questionable personality of Stevenson. Hence 
our blind struggle to bind this Proteus who 
turns into bright fire and then into running 
water under our hands. The truth is that 
as a literary force, there was no such man 
as Stevenson ; and after we have racked our 
brains to find out the mechanism which has 
been vanquishing the chess players of Europe, 
246 






ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

there emerges out of the Box of Maelzel a 
pale boy. 

But the courage of this boy, the heroism of 
his life, illumine all his works with a per- 
sonal interest. The last ten years of his life 
present a long battle with death. 

We read of his illnesses, his spirit ; we hear 
how he never gave up, but continued his 
works by dictation and in dumb show when 
he was too weak to hold the pen, too weak 
to speak. This courage and the lovable 
nature of Stevenson won the world's heart. 
He was regarded with a peculiar tenderness 
such as is usually given only to the young. 
Honor, and admiration mingled with affec- 
tion followed him to his grave. Whatever his 
artistic doctrines, he revealed his spiritual 
nature in his work. It was this nature 
which made him thus beloved. 






/ 



247 













v*« 















C 




^ ft ■< _ <?', /* * -f* 



y ' f A 




*-A 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Sept. 2007 

PreservationTechnologies 

<* A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

.\S « V ' * h *$> 111 Thomson Park Drive 

.:"■ i?' ^r/ffTzi. ' Cranberry Township, PA 16066 



EADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724) 779-2111 






' 



,y <p 



^ 



**. . * & ^ 



"* -ft ^°« ■ 



-S </> 












<r y o * x "* <o* ^> 






v-v 












,^% ' 










^ 






' 






.^% 






%<&* 



■\ 



